Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison on Sunday introduced a new data center product that is capable of delivering data analysis at the speed of thought.

Introduced at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, the Exalytics Intelligence Machine incorporates an in-memory database that place information to be processed in RAM, rather than reading it off disks, which provides a boost to performance.

The new machine has 40 processor cores and offers an impressive 1TB of DRAM. What is more striking is that compression allows the machine to hold 5TB to 10TB of data in memory.

Its software stack includes parallelized editions of Oracle's TimesTen in-memory database, business intelligence stack and Essbase online analytical processing server.

There is an adaptive in-memory, self-tuning cache that decides which information should be stored in memory. Explaining the point, Ellison said, "If people keep asking the same questions over and over again, we keep the answers in memory so we don't have to compute them again."

The design principle of the Exalytics Intelligence Machine puts it in direct competition with HANA in-memory computing platform from SAP.