[reg_windows]

This is so very far from the truth. The 2000's were a poor decade for Sun's management of SPARC. They wasted hundreds of millions on the Rock chip which is a story waiting to be written someday (Marc Tremblay, the Rock architect, was being portrayed with god-like praise by Sun executives, always citing the mountains of patents he had but as we know, patents aren't a leading indicator of technical or business success). Then they foolishly latched the SPARC program to a Stanford professor's idea of Chip Multi Threading which had some good ideas but was not performant at the very time when X64 clock rates were rocketing, due to Intel and AMD's fab processes. I'm not an Oracle apologist by any means but Oracle revived SPARC R&D and made the chip competitive again. Larry even funded a lower cost S7 SPARC chip intended for high volume cloud deployments. And as has been mentioned, Oracle also supported (again, with millions of dollars) the SPARC software-in-silicon program, which provided hardware support for encryption, bad pointer detection, and tabular memory compression/searching (DAX). They tried but it was too late for SPARC. But it should never be said that Oracle didn't pump a lot money into SPARC after the Sun aquisition.