When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems five years ago, Larry Ellison made a lot of noise about how owning the entire systems stack, from applications to silicon, would allow him to do unique things with Oracle’s servers. After five years of bluster and hype, he may finally have delivered — but will customers buy what he’s selling?

Oracle is announcing a new line of servers at OpenWorld on Monday based on a new Sparc processor called the M7. It has the usual improvements you’d expect in a new chip — more cores, bigger caches, higher bandwidth — but more interesting are software functions Oracle has embedded into the silicon to improve the performance and security of applications.

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