Oracle Unveils Faster Servers with T5 Microprocessors

Servers built with Oracle's new T5 microprocessors have beaten several performance records and run business databases and applications much faster than previous versions, the billionaire told reporters at a launch event in Redwood City.

Ellison is focusing Oracle's hardware division, acquired through the $5.6 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems in 2010, on selling high-end server equipment, including the SPARC T5- and M5-powered servers and microchips shown off on Tuesday.

Tuned to work with the company's software products, they are part of Oracle's vision of becoming a one-stop shop for cloud-computing products, offering applications, databases and computing infrastructure over the internet.

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HP Paid Intel $690 Million to Keep Itanium Alive - Court Findings | X-bit Labs

In a bid to secure its mission-critical HP-UX platform, Hewlett-Packard has paid Intel Corp. around $690 to keep Itanium microprocessor alive till 2017 and update it in timely manner, court findings reveal.
Back in 2008 the maker of servers paid Intel $440 million in order to keep producing and updating Itanium microprocessors from 2009 to 2014. In 2010, the two companies signed another $250 million deal, which obliged Intel to continue making Itanium central processing units for HP's machines till 2017, according to Wired. Under the terms of the agreements, HP has to pay for chips it gets from Intel, whereas the latter launches Tukwila, Poulson, Kittson and Kittson+ chips in a bid to gradually boost performance of the platform.
Given the fact that Itanium is essentially on life support, it is not surprising that software makers, including Microsoft and Red Hat have already stopped developing software for Itanium. Large makers of servers, Dell and IBM, dropped Itanium back in 2005. In early 2011 Intel discontinued support for Itanium in its C/C++ and Fortran compilers. In fact, Intel has even relocated engineers developing Itanium products onto Xeon-related projects, another signal that the platform will hardly evolve substantially going forward.

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