Say what you like about Oracle Corporation’s CEO Larry Ellision, but he’s sticking to his guns this time around. When his company acquired Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion back in 2010, he said that Oracle wanted to control its own hardware and built specialized kit tuned to run its software stack. And despite slow sales to begin with, Oracle has continued to invest in hardware and those efforts are at last bearing fruit.

Oracle’s latest innovation is the SPARC M7 chip, announced on Tuesday at the Hot Chipsconference in Cupertino, California.

The new chip comes with 32 CPU cores – an increase from 12 cores found in the M6 – and is being made on a more advanced 20-nanometer process that allows for faster, smaller transistors, said John Fowler, Executive Vice-President of Systems at Oracle, in a presentation. As such, the M7 is capable of delivering a three-to-four times performance boost for applications.

Even better for some customers is that the SPARC M7 chip features built-in accelerators which should deliver much bigger gains for certain tasks, added Fowler. These include in-memory processing, which reduces query times by fetching data from the main memory instead of the disk. In-memory processing is featured in Oracle’s latest 12c database too, and Ellison has said it will be able to crunch data at “ungodly speeds”.

Another key feature is its ability to handle “live decompression”, which means more data can be sent in a compressed format, so there won’t be any performance penalties when its sent for processing, while the M7 also reduces message latency between servers.

The SPARC M7 is the fifth processor Oracle has built since it snapped up Sun Microsystems. Fowler says that the new features will be “transparent” to Oracle 12c database users, though they’re not “unique or private” to the database only. This means that other applications can take advantage of the features too. For instance, Oracle is expecting many developers will want to take advantage of the M7’s new application data integrity feature, though Fowler admitted it would take a bit more skill to benefit from something like in-memory,