CEO Larry Ellison was, as usual, in feisty form when he took to the stage at Oracle's headquarters Monday to launch the products. He made several bold performance claims and said he's "looking forward" to competing for IBM's customers.

The T4 is the latest addition to the Sparc processor family developed by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired last year. It has eight processor cores, down from 16 in the T3, but each core runs at up to 3GHz, compared to the T3's 1.65Ghz. That helps gives the T4 five-times the single-threaded performance of its predecessor, according to Ellison.

The Sparc T4 is, priced from US$16,000 to $160,000. It will also be used in the , a high-end system that will pack 1,200 CPU threads in a single system the size of a server rack.

Oracle still won't give pricing for the SuperCluster, which it last year. Nor would it give a firm ship date, although John Fowler, executive vice president for Oracle's systems group, said in an interview that the product will be out by the end of the year.

It's similar in some ways to Oracle's Exadata Database Machine and Exalogic Elastic Cloud. In all three cases, Oracle says it has tightly engineered the server, storage and network components to optimize performance, and integrated its software on top of that.