The next Gen SPARC platform is here

Oracle has now announced the release of its next generation SPARC platform. The eighth generation platform is used for engineered systems and as a cloud service.

The new platform will run on the new SPARC M8 microprocessor and Oracle boasts that it can deliver encryption and hashing two times faster than Intel's x86 platform and also double the speed of its own SPARC M7 microprocessor.

According to Oracle, the new SPARC is designed in a way so that the system is always secure. The company said that the design of the new SPARC M8 provides always-on security by default and built-in protection of in-memory data structures from hacks and programming errors. The processor is also engineered to run the Oracle database faster than any other microprocessor.

"Oracle has long been a pioneer in engineering software and hardware together to secure high-performance infrastructure for any workload of any size," said Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, Oracle. "SPARC was already the fastest, most secure processor in the world for running Oracle Database and Java. SPARC M8 extends that lead even further.”

SPARC was originally acquired by Oracle through its purchase of Sun Microsystems in 2009 and has typically been used to run Unix workloads and Oracle offers it in its servers and various engineered systems.