Oracle Said To Be Baking A Low-Cost SPARC Chip

Written by Michael Larabel in Oracle on 30 July 2015 at 12:43 PM EDT. 18 Comments
ORACLE
While Debian just dropped support for SPARC and many are writing off SPARC as dead under Oracle with their offering of x86 servers, a new report out today suggests otherwise. It's being reported that Oracle plans to introduce "Sonoma" as a low-cost SPARC processor.

Oracle's Sonoma chip is said to be a new, lost-cost processor for SPARC-based servers to compete with Intel's Xeon processors. Unfortunately the exact pricing and anticipated launch date for Sonoma aren't available, other than that it's more of a Xeon competitor rather than the currently elevated SPARC price-range. Sonoma is also one of the first new SPARC designs out in a few years.

More details on Oracle's Sonoma processors are expected to be announced at the Hot Chips conference, coming up near the end of August. Hopefully the cost will be low enough that it will be worthwhile to pick up a Sonoma system for benchmarking at Phoronix, otherwise almost surely there will be performance results uploaded from the community to OpenBenchmarking.org.

More details as they become available.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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