"Once we own Sun we’re going to increase the investment in Sparc. We think designing our own chips is very, very important. Even Apple is designing its own chips these days," Ellison said. "Right now, Sparc chips do some things better than Intel chips and vice-versa. For example, Sparc is much more energy efficient than Intel while delivering the same performance on a per socket basis."

"Sparc machines are much less expensive to run than Intel machines," he said.

Ellison also announced a desire to continue working with Fujitsu on future development of Sparc. Fujitsu sells its own line of Sparc servers and has long worked with Sun on development of servers based on the chips.

"We want to work with Fujitsu to design advanced features into the Sparc microprocessor aimed at improving Oracle database performance. In my opinion, this will enable Sparc Solaris open-system mainframes and servers to challenge IBM’s dominance in the data center," he said.

(James Niccolai, in San Francisco, contributed to this report.)