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Oracle isn't a hardware company like Apple and Sun. And while RISC has had a renaissance there's no guarantee that would have applied to SPARC given that SPARC'
by hnlmorg 4y ago
Oracle isn't a hardware company like Apple and Sun. And while RISC has had a renaissance there's no guarantee that would have applied to SPARC given that SPARC's licensing is very different to ARM (and RISC-V).
So I wouldn't say it was a bad management decision to kill SPARC -- putting aside my personal love for the architecture and Sun's technologies in general.
- OrvalWintermute 4y agoOracle does do hardware [1] but it is mainly used just to house backend Oracle DB better than much of commodity servers. https://www.oracle.com/engineered-systems/exadata/ https://www.oracle.com/engineered-systems/exadata/
- hnlmorg 4y agoYeah but isn't Exadata largely just off the shell components? At it's heart it's a high end Intel server running Linux. I wouldn't say this product makes Oracle a hardware company in the same way that Apple and Sun were. This just proves Oracle are a software company like Microsoft (ie they do dabble in hardware but it's the software that makes their margins). I guess another way of putting it is this: - do they build the software to sell their hardware, - or build their hardware to sell their software. In the case of Apple and Sun, it was the former. In the case of Oracle, it's the latter.
- gnufx 4y agoExadata at least used to use Infiniband hardware inherited from Sun and not on anyone else's shelf.