Oracle, IBM to unwrap new Unix server processors at conference

June 19, 2013

Demand for mainframe and high-performance Unix servers is falling, but a new wave of SPARC and IBM Power chips for the servers will be unwrapped at the Hot Chips conference in late August.IBM, Oracle and Fujitsu -- the main suppliers of Unix server chips -- will talk about their next-generation RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) chips at the conference, which will be held Stanford University from Aug. 25 to 28. The chips typically go into high-availability servers, which are falling out of favor to the inexpensive and flexible x86 servers.IBM will talk about the "next-generation Power microprocessor," according to the conference agenda. The next set of SPARC processors will also be detailed: Oracle will talk about SPARC M6, described in the agenda as the company's "next generation processor for massively scalable symmetric multiprocessor data center servers," and Fujitsu will talk about SPARC64 X+, successor to the current 16-core SPARC64 X.The new chips, when released, will be critical for the companies. Revenue from Unix servers has fallen for seven straight quarters as lines between the non-x86 and x86 processors blur. While server revenue for IBM, Oracle and Fujitsu declined in the first quarter of this year compared to the same quarter a year ago, revenue for x86-exclusive vendors Dell and Cisco went up. IBM also sells x86 servers, and the top server maker, Hewlett-Packard, sells servers running on x86 and also Intel's Itanium processors, whose future is in question.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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