I’d love for someone more informed to provide some insider detail, but by appearances Oracle really, really tried to make SPARC a differentiator for them after the Sun acquisition.

They were shipping new systems (M8) based on a consistent in-house evolution of SPARC almost 8 years after the acquisition, a veritable eternity in tech time.

Eventually the market just said, no, we want x64 and a path to Cloud.

One wonders if they’d kept at it for a few more years whether they’d have needed to bid for Altera at all, given the gaps opened up by Intel’s struggles.