Re: OT: Sparc not dead yet


JF Mezei wrote:
http://news.com.com/Sun+at+work+on+Niagara%2C+Rock+successors/2100-1006_3-6062008.html?tag=nefd.top

Sun announces successors to Niagara and Rock successors, at first at
90nm process and later at 65nm .


"Niagara has eight processing cores, each able to handle four threads,
enabling a total of 32 independent software sequences to run
simultaneously. Niagara II increases this limit to 64;"


IA64 is "soon" getting to 2 processors per core.


Looks to me like Sun carefully edged its bets, with both Sparc and 8086
and isn't going to prematurely staop Sparc with its huge installed base
until the 8086 has really scaled up.

The announcments from Sun thje Niagara II Tape out, Rock II and Niagara
III followons effectively indicate that Sun are committed to SPARC for
at least another 5-6 years. Anything could change in the mean time but
this is a pretty strong commitment and rather more than simply hedging
its bets.

The next couple of years are going to be very interesting. Sun have hit
the sweet spot with Niagara in terms of performance and power
consumption. The new EPA standards arround server environmentals may
play straight into Sun's court making the T1 based systems a prime
contender to replace x86 and Power/IA64 based systems.


The big difference with IA64 is that IA64 has no installed base, it is
PaRisc and Alpha that have installed bases.

So those who were saying that Sparc was dead were wrong. It isn't dead
yet, even if it might be true that Sun intends to eventually replace
Sparc with the 8086.

There is no evidence that Sun ever seriously considered replacing SPARC
with x86 only speculation. What of course has changed is Sun's adoption
of x86 a strategy driven by the realisation that they can make money
out of x86 platforms hosting Linux, Windows and Solaris plus the
adoption of a standard server packaging to support low end SPARC and
x86 servers.

regards
Andrew Harrison

.

Relevant Pages

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