The acquisition of Sun by Oracle means Oracle gets hardware that’s had a difficult time in the marketplace: Sun’s UltraSparc technology. The SPARC family has had a long life and competes head to head with Intel and AMD’s processors. While Sun doesn’t manufacture their own hardware (and this CPU) any more, the design of the UltraSparc family is important.

The question is, can Oracle continue to develop the family when fewer and fewer organizations are buying it? The advantages of the UltraSparc family might be strong (lower power consumption and sparse architecture), but few organizations seen to be buying into the idea of a single-vendor processor platform, which is what the UltraSparc-driven server family is– despite the fact that Fujitsu also produces hardware using Sun’s UltraSparc platform.

It would be bad to see still another CPU maker and their architecture die. The computer industry needs the diversity of components and competition to thrive.