I just saw the news that Sun may be canceling the long-awaited next-gen SPARC CPU line. (Details - Sun Is Said to Cancel Big Chip Project - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com) Instead, they'll rely on Fujitsu for SPARC CPUs -- however it seems that Fujitsu has already scaled back R&D because the SPARC line isn't profitable.

Personally, I believe this is a good choice. With all of the performance testing I've done with OTM and Oracle DBs, there are other architectures and platforms that perform better. To date, many customers have had to move away from SPARC and PA-RISC architectures to x86-64 CPUs in order to get the performance they need. While I do love the benefits of competition, in this economy consolidation is inevitable.

Who does this benefit most? Since the next generation Itanium processors are delayed will 2010, it'll be the Intel Nahalem processors.

I'm especially interested in the performance of Nahalem and look forward to benchmarking them in in a couple weeks. I'll keep you posted!

--Chris