Larry Ellison, chief executive officer of Oracle yesterday introduced two computer systems based on chip designs acquired from Sun Microsystems at the Oracle OpenWorld 2012 conference in San Francisco. The company unveiled one a set of mid-range computers using a chip called the T5 and the other a high-end system using the more powerful M5 chip.

"When Oracle bought Sun, a lot of people said 'Sparc is a real laggard,'" Larry Ellison, Oracle?s chief executive officer, said at the event, referring to chips developed by Sun. "The big question is, when playing catch-up, that?s got to be easier. Can you keep it up, can you keep going? And the answer is, we think we can."

Oracle?s Sparc computers, which run the Solaris operating system, and IBM?s Power servers, which run its own version of the Unix operating system, compete in a shrinking market.

The Oracle SPARC T5 and M5 servers are intended for mission critical applications. The T5, Oracle claims, is the world?s fastest CPU and includes wire speed encryption and over 2.3 times performance over the previous SPARC microprocessor.

A T5-8 Oracle server supports 128 DDR3-1066 DIMM slots - that's 16 a processor, and can provide 4TB of memory. It can also take up to eight 2.5-inch HDDs or SSDs.

The entry-level price for an Oracle T5 system will be less than $500,000 for a configuration capable of housing eight chips, Oracle said.