Re: IBM bets 2.9 Billion on Linux for semiconductor manufacture

From: Anthony Mandic (g5_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 06/30/03 

Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 19:43:07 +1000

Bruce Adler wrote:
>
> "James smyth" <starlink101@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
> >
> > Let's face it, when your dealing with sums of money this large you need the
> > reliability that solaris simply can't provide.
>
> What a load of nonsense.

        It sure was.

> Six or seven years ago, when I was doing consulting work at Sun, because
> of a meltdown problem I was asked to work on, I first found out that Intel
> used Solaris x86 2.5 to automate and manage all their Pentium production
> plants.

        As you would when you have a lot at stake.

> I was also told that downtime on a single Pentium production line would
> cost Intel more than $1 million per hour in lost revenue. So they clearly
> must have done their homework before choosing Solaris x86.

        And obviously IBM don't care if they throw good money out after bad.

> Intel treated their Solaris x86 based production management system like it
> was a secret weapon they didn't want their competitors (or maybe Microsoft)
> to know anything about.

        Hmmm ... I wonder if IBM advertising that they choose Linux is a ruse.
        Probably some retard at IBM thought "If we can get our competitors to
        go with Linux, that would put them back 10 years at least." Naturally,
        no one was fooled.

> Basically, Intel used redundant systems, and mirrored disks, and clusters,
> and watchdogs, and hot spares and every method you can think of to ensure
> that a problem should never come up that could ever possibly cause them to
> have to halt one of their production lines due to a failure of one of the
> Sx86 systems.

        Apart from the obvious choice of using Sun hardware too.

> After several years of experience with their production systems they were
> very happy with Solaris x86 and said that the only problems they ever
> saw were hardware related.

        Naturally.

> Two days later, Intel sent me a message through Sun management that
> said basically, "nevermind". When I asked how come, Intel was embarrassed
> to admit that they hadn't noticed that (A) it was a single bad system
> that was causing all their problems and (B) they weren't using ECC
> memory, and (C) they could reproduce the failure by warming the system's
> memory chips by a few degrees and (D) their hardware memory checker was a
> piece of ***.

        No doubt it was developed on a Linux system.

-am © 2003