Oracle's database and high-performance workloads will run faster with the company's latest Sparc M6 chip, which has been tuned specially for the company's applications. The latest Sparc processor has 12 processor cores, effectively doubling the number of cores than its predecessor, M5, which shipped earlier this year. Each M6 core will be able to run 8 threads simultaneously, giving the chip the ability to run 96 threads simultaneously, said Ali Vahidsafa , senior hardware engineer at Oracle, during a presentation about M6 at the Hot Chips conference in Stanford, California.