From Oracle magazine (May 2011) we can read about how Oracle is looking at the good old SPARC architecture. The article presents a five year plan in these terms:
Five-Year Plan
When Oracle announced its SPARC roadmap at Oracle OpenWorld 2010, John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Oracle, revealed a five-year trajectory for Oracle’s SPARC servers that included 4 times the number of cores between 2010 and 2015, 32 times the number of threads, 16 times the memory capacity, 40 times the number of transactions per minute, and 10 times the number of Java operations per second.
“Core to the server design element for Sun for many years has been SPARC, the first volume 64-bit processor. It’s about building mission-critical, high-performance systems for the enterprise,” said Fowler during his Oracle OpenWorld keynote. “We’re committing publicly . . . to at least double application performance every other year,” he added, noting that this commitment comes with binary investment protection for customers, who are often “picking . . . business applications and running them for many years, expecting performance improvements throughout.”
