back to article Oracle: Mine is bigger and, um, more integrated

With the European Union finally giving approval of the $7.4bn acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle, the players in the IT industry can finally don their armor - made of iron, of course, and polished with software - to prepare for battle in the field of integrated systems. Oracle and its Sun division, which could retain …

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  1. rchrd

    It's SPARC not Sparc

    Well, at least The Reg is consistent ... consistently spelling it Sparc when the trademarked acronym is SPARC in every article I've seen. When will you get it right?

    SPARC SPARC SPARC SPARC SPARC SPARC SPARC SPARC SPARC

    1. No, I will not fix your computer
      Headmaster

      Pedants AHOY!

      As the acronym is not spelt out when spoken "ess-pee-ay-ar-kay" but pronounced as a word "Sparc" it is correct grammar to capitalise as a noun, think BBC, IBM, EU versus "Laser", but really... meh...

  2. Ivan Hallworth
    Thumb Up

    First Rate Analysis - 27th interesting

    This is first-rate and illuminating analysis, thanks Timothy. 27th January will be most interesting, though the Apple webathon may be a bit shorter and easier to get through!

    Warmly,

    Best,

    Ivan Hallworth

  3. Ian 35

    Pillar is solid kit

    I'm a great fan of the ZFS Sun products --- Bryan Cantrill has slept on my floor --- by it also has to be said that the Pillar kit is very impressive in hardware packaging and architecture terms. There's a niche for both, I think.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    A chalenge for Sparc T

    Looking back in 2002 Sun’s Summit on which Scott McNealy promised to make a 32 times faster CPU and the whole story of Coolthreads and Sparc T after that, I have to admit that for Oracle it will be a challenge to put the next architecture on the right rails.

    From the beginning, Sparc T was advertised as the best choice for frontend systems (btw, it is absolutely true by the nature of CMT technology) and was targeted to ISPs. The implementation of Logical Domains was an attempt to compete with virtualization available on Intel and AMD platforms, but the single thread performance of Sparc T limits the application of LDoms to something similar to a hosting on ISP side, so it seems that the idea was very questionable. Later on, Sun tried to resolve thread performance with “a transactional memory” enchantment on Rock, but unfortunately, the platform was canceled.

    With SUN, Oracle is acquiring the field with the variety of modern and legacy platforms which been built on Sparc, Intel, AMD or Fujitsu CPU. The filed has been waiting some solid roadmap for next 3-5 years from last April and that is the challenge.

  5. Kebabbert

    Anonymous Coward,

    Well the Niagara is more than 32 times faster. So SUN has succeeded.

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