with the closest competition being 2x-3x slower (socket to socket comparison) as of mid-2009. Oracle Corporation announced its intention to acquire Sun in April 2009, a deal which closed in January 2010. By the end of 2010, market competitors started to release similar products with multiple cores, a less radical approach to threading, but with similar performance characteristics. Oracle continued the radical approach of the original Afara SPARC architecture (large numbers of threads per large number of simple cores) with the release of the SPARC T3 processor in September 2010 - the first 16 core commodity central processing unit, yielding another top performance benchmark, but only by a slim margin. Olokotun returned to Stanford University to head its "Pervasive Parallelism Lab" in 2008, to help shape the future of software, as he did with hardware. Fermi Wang and Les Kohn founded Ambarella with a focus on high definition video capture and delivery markets. References Defunct computer companies of the United States Companies based in Sunnyvale, California Sun Microsystems hardware Sun Microsystems acquisitions