Microprocessors are the pearls in the IT oyster. When they’re smoothly designed—like Oracle’s powerful new SPARC M6—they’re beautiful to behold. (For engineers, anyway.). The processor has 12 physical cores—twice that of the current-generation M5. Using virtualization, it can take those dozen cores and run 96 separate threads. Click through to read more about the chip powering Oracle’s Big Memory Machines.