A possible IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. merger, where IBM is looking to acquire Sun Microsystems for around $6.5 billion, makes business sense and has significant implications for the SPARC and POWER microprocessors.

EETimes India briefly discusses the impact of consolidation on SPARC processors.

“An IBM-Sun combination raises several interesting technology questions underneath the business and cultural issues.

It is easy to imagine IBM might let the Sparc microprocessor architecture die a gradual death, articulating a road map to its Power and X86 systems. That’s just part of the consolidation game in an industry that has winnowed out dozens of interesting but relatively low volume CPUs.

But the Niagara version of Sparc for Web servers has pioneered work in multi-core processing. It sports the most threads and integration of any chip in the server space with embedded crypto and networking cores.

An overdue Rock chip planned to push the boundaries in multi-core for database processing. It was described as leading the way in news areas such as transactional memory and scout threads. ”

Michael Feldman, the editor of HPCwire, in an article says that IBM might be tempted to keep the Sun’s SPARC/UltraSPARC technology around for awhile, inasmuch as Big Blue currently doesn’t have a CMT solution that can handle 64 threads per socket.

“But it’s hard to imagine IBM continuing to invest in the technology for the long term, given that Intel and AMD will eventually offer similar capabilities for a fraction of the cost. On the other hand, IBM could sell off the SPARC IP to someone else. The logical buyer would be Fujitsu, who builds its own line of SPARC-based systems, some of which are supercomputers.”