Alright, Oracle’s done integrated hardware and software design with the Exadata database machine.But Exadata uses standard Intel chips. Are you going to discontinue the SPARC chip?No. Once we own Sun we’re going to increase the investment in SPARC.We think designing our own chips is very, very important. Even Apple is designing its own chips these days.Right now, SPARC chips do some things better than Intel chips and vice-versa.For example, SPARC is much more energy efficient than Intel while delivering the same performance on a per socket basis.This is not just a green issue, it’s an economic issue.Today, database centers are paying as much for electricity to run their computers as they pay to buy their computers.SPARC machines are much less expensive to run than Intel machines.So is that your plan, to use SPARC to compete by lowering a data center’s electricity bills?No, our primary reason for designing our own chips is to build computers with the very best performance, reliability and security available in the market.Some system features work much better if they are implemented in silicon rather than software.Once we own Sun, we’ll be able to plan and synchronize new features from silicon to software, just like IBM and the other big system suppliers.
