Ellison Insists Sun's Sparc Still Has a Future

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Published at: seekingalpha.com

Larry Ellison has struck gold again in California with SUN.

May 14, 2009

Analysis by: GLG Expert Contributor

-Sparc is a high quality product    there is a market for high reliability servers. - The Solaris operating system readily lends itself to custom SW development -Java is just the icing on the cake with the acquisition of SUN

Jim TurleyOwner and AnalystSilicon Insider

Oracle should kill SPARC. It's among the slowest CPU chips around, and the engineering costs are staggering.

May 14, 2009

* Microprocessor development is hugely expensive, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars per year, every year, forever. * It's an expensive treadmill. You can never stop improving the processor or you rapidly fall behind. * Unique CPU technologies do not translate into customer benefits. So what's the point? * In-house CPU development is largely an ego-driven enterprise. "Real men make microprocessors" is not a good business strategy. * SPARC is a dog. If you're going to bet the farm on an in-house CPU, pick a different one. * Using Intel (or other commercial supplier's) chips would be a much better use of Oracle's resources and it wouldn't hurt customers a bit.

Sun's Sparc Chip: "The reports of my death have been greatly exagerated..."

May 13, 2009

Analysis by: GLG Expert Contributor

Larry Ellison will not kill and/or disinvest in Sun's Sparc architecture. 1) Oracle's data base software runs very efficiently on Sparc and especially on the newer CMT (Chip Multi-Threading) Niagara architecture. 2) The next generation 16 core CMT processor, code named ROCK, is due out this fall and incorporates innovative speedup technology that Oracle can leverage 3) CMT chips are much more power-efficient per unit of work accomplished than Intel or AMD based X86 architecture chips 4) Larry Ellison's core mantra is that hardware and software designed together is always more efficient and elegant than systems designed in isolation. ...And, Larry can do this without sacrificing Oracle's historically high margins!

Tight Integration Makes For a Better System

May 13, 2009

Analysis by: GLG Expert Contributor

Larry Ellison has told Reuters, “We are definitely not going to exit the hardware business. If a company designs both hardware and software, it can build much better systems than if they only design the software. That’s why Apple’s iPhone is so much better than Microsoft phones.”