Oracle Unveils New Sparc Servers, 'World's Fastest' Chip

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Oracle has announced a major overhaul to its line of Sparc servers. According to the company, the processors powering the new hardware are the world’s fastest.

Jeffrey Burt from eWeek reported, “Oracle is rolling out new midrange and high-end servers powered by new SPARC processors that officials say are the fastest in the world. At a Webcast event at the software giant’s Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters, CEO Larry Ellison boasted that the SPARC T5 and M5 chips and the servers that they power are proof points that his company’s controversial $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems three years ago is paying dividends.”

InformationWeek’s Doug Henschen added, “Oracle on Tuesday announced a complete refresh of its midrange and high-end Sparc servers for Unix, touting 2X to 10X performance gains and claiming significant speed and cost advantages over IBM Power servers…. The new servers include the midrange T5-2, T5-4 and T5-8, which replace prior-generation T4 servers, and the M5-16 and M5-32, which replace prior-generation M9000 series servers. (“T5” and “M5” are the new chips while the “-X” designations refer to the number of sockets.)”

Bloomberg BusinessWeek quoted Ellison, who said, “When Oracle bought Sun, a lot of people thought the Sparc microprocessor was a real laggard. A lot of people believed we would never catch up. Well, we caught up and then passed the competition.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Don Clark observed, “The product overhaul line can’t arrive too soon for Oracle. Though dominant in sales of software used by businesses, the company has struggled to prove that its addition of Sun’s hardware line will pay off. In the third fiscal quarter ended in February, Oracle reported last week that revenue from hardware products declined 23% to $671 million, while operating profit from the business fell 37% to $123 million.”