It was touch and go there for a moment. I have to admit that when Oracle took over Sun Microsystems. I had fear in my heart for the future of the SPARC processor. I know, Oracle early on made all kinds of commitments to SPARC, and to Solaris, and to Java, and to the customers, blah, blah, blah.

We all know how it goes when Company X takes over Company Y. There is a honeymoon period of about 18 months (maybe 24 months), and then KA-POW!

But Oracle's announcement of a new five year plan for the SPARC T-Series processors has brought me new hope. It's no secret that, at Ctest Labs, that we are in large part powered by SPARC processors. We find the SPARC support for parallel processing and multithreading right on target. As far as we are concerned, the original SPARC T1 eight-core/four-hardware-threads-per-core is a thing of beauty, and every kid should have one. But the fact that Oracle is beefing up the SPARC T4, which is an eight-core system slated to ship in the first half of 2012, and they are now designing the new 16-core SPARC T5 processors simply puts a spring in my step.

Oracle's Five Year Plan for the SPARC T-Series is really promising. But now that those fears have been put to rest, I wonder whether Oracle will update the Sun C++ compilers to support the new C++ Standard? Hmmm...Now that the new C++ Standard has more support for parallelism and threading, it would be totally awesome if we had a nice new shiny Oracle/Sun C++ compiler to help us exercise the new SPARC T4.

By the way, has anybody out there implemented the new support for parallelism and threading found in the new C++ Standard? Maybe Oracle could be one of the leaders!