Sparc go bye-bye

Oracle may let Sun's Sparc chip die a sad and lonely death.

Oracle's buyout of Sun could be the final nail in the coffin of Sparc, according to the strokers of beards and people in the know.

Oracle has made it clear that it was Sun's software business was all it was interested in, which leads many to wonder what it will do with Sun's hardware.

The word on the street is that Sparc, which has been losing ground to rival Unix server vendors like Hewlett-Packard and IBM could be sold off, or scrapped entirely.

The Standard has been doing a straw poll of its tame analysts. They noted that Oracle boss Larry Ellison implied that Solaris is more important to Oracle than Sun's Sparc chip.

Oracle has already built high-performance servers with Hewlett-Packard for data warehouses based on industry-standard hardware, it does not really need Sparc.

Specialised chips like Sparc have not been selling as well as companies move to industry-standard servers. Sun had been slowing the development of the chip because it lacked the cash to keep up. Already some of Sparc's development had been outsourced to Fujutsu.

However it is unlikely that Oracle will pull the plug on Sparc right away.

Gabriel Consulting's Dan Olds said that Oracle would be unlikely to stop developing the Sparc chips right away, and may continue to offer systems based on the processor.

But J. Gold Associates' Jack Gold said that Oracle did not have any incentive to continue Sparc development as it goes against its policy of being as open standards as possible.