In this transcript of a Reuters interview with Larry Ellison, he says that the SPARC architecture isn’t going away. Some quotes from the interview:

“No, we are definitely not going to exit the hardware business.”

“Once we own Sun we’re going to increase the investment in SPARC. We think designing our own chips is very, very important. Even Apple is designing its own chips these days. Right now, SPARC chips do some things better than Intel chips and vice-versa. For example, SPARC is much more energy efficient than Intel while delivering the same performance on a per socket basis. This is not just a green issue, it’s an economic issue. Today, database centers are paying as much for electricity to run their computers as they pay to buy their computers. SPARC machines are much less expensive to run than Intel machines.”

“Once we own Sun, we’ll be able to plan and synchronize new features from silicon to software, just like IBM and the other big system suppliers. We want to work with Fujitsu to design advanced features into the SPARC microprocessor aimed at improving Oracle database performance. In my opinion, this will enable SPARC Solaris open-system mainframes and servers to challenge IBM’s dominance in the data center. Sun was very successful for a very long time selling computer systems based on the SPARC chip and the Solaris operating system. Now, with the added power of integrated Oracle software, we think they can be again.”