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Sun to Merge UltraSPARC with Fujitsu's SPARC64?
Waldmeister writes "The Register has a story from a japanese source, that Sun and Fujitsu are planning to combine their Unix server businesses. Even if Sun doesn't comment on this, they acknowledge that Scott McNealy met Fujitsu's CEO this week. If this will happen, Fujitsu will get the bigger chunk of manufacturing and engineering. With the PrimePower systems outperforming Sun's SunFire systems for some time now, this sounds reasonable, too. And it gives Sun the chance to more resources to extend their Linux and x86 business." There's also a Reuters story.
What purpose this can serve apart from assuring certain death for both parties, I can't imagine.
Who says they have a long term contract?
The section of the article quoted above doesn't say anything about it.
SUN's biggest problem is that they employ a ton of chip (second only to Intel) and system designers to design their systems. As I understand it, Fujitsu develops their own chip compatable with the SPARC architecture. The two companies are now competing with Intel who sells 100 million CPUs a year (Xeon doesn't require a whole lot of R&D beyond a regular P4), in a good year they both might sell 5 million CPUs (I'm not positive about fujitsu's unit volumes) so their cost per chip is significantly higher. Combining these efforts should help both companies reduce costs, by spreading lower development costs over more CPUs, and might help them compete with the new IA-32 based competitors.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Look at this Slashdot story from Feb 2003. The article referenced there shows that in 64bit land there are haves (Intel, AMD, IBM, SPARC64 and still around: Alpha) and have-nots (everybody else, including UltraSPARC, PA_RISC and MIPS). For Sun, the most logical way to stay competitive in the performance race and get out of the losers' gene pool is to join forces with Fujitsus SPARC64 program. So it looks like the natural thing to do.
On every desktop at work, we have 2 machines, a dell laptop and a sun workstation. And over the last few years, everyone started putting linux on the sun workstations. Gnome helped keep some users on Solaris, but the main people switched to KDE and SuSE linux.
Then someone finally stated, why dont we just buy a dell desktop and put Linux on it, and have full support. Looks like the death of Sun workstation in our ops group. The only people left are the NOC which use X and Citrix, and will stay with the Ultra10s (multiheaded)...
Sun had a good product with the Sunblades, but they didnt push or support linux on them. 1000 bux and you got a nice little workstation, took standard PC parts, and works pretty well.
So, if Sun gets to keep the workstation market, and Fijitsu keeps the server market, seems like a bad move for Sun. Why would you buy x86 servers from Sun that run linux, when you could by x86 servers from a true x86 company like Dell? OR buy support from Redhat, a true linux support company?
Doesnt make sense.
Neither does Solaris/x86. And, 64-bit Solaris has nearly a decade's worth of deployment in the real world behind it.
Mcneally's job is quite certainly on the ropes. I would suspect that he would break friendships to try and keep it going.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
.. any bets on how long it'll take Darl to start foaming at the mouth, claiming that Fujitsu now owes SCO some $ due to partnering with Sun?
Not going to happen. Fujitsu licenses Solaris from Sun for use on their Sparc64 servers. As SCO has already stated, Sun purchased a license that allows them to do whatever they want with the System V code, including selling derivative works. As far as I know, Sun is the only vendor right now that can legally sell you a Linux distro, at least according to SCO.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
With the newly idle systems designers, Sun should:
In addition, Sun should do the same with Opteron (and perhaps Itanium), supporting Solaris across the entire line, and hosting platform-specific operating systems where appropriate (including Windows data center edition and enterprise Linux, plus even HP-UX). Sun should become the commodity manufacturer of enterprise hardware, maintaining the reliability that we see in Sparc wherever possible.
This is Carly's worst nightmare.
Sun has a proprietary lock-in with tons of Solaris SPARC applications on its customers.
Besides, if Sun just built IPF computers just as everyone does, it would be on its path to irrelevance, and this path is already leaded by Unisys. It would be very little to differentiate from Unisys, Dell and the such, and margins would suffer accordingly.
As it is, UltraSPARC systems are faster than Intel ones, even if processors are slower, simply because you can buy a system with lotsa processors, lotsa very fast memory to cache your database in, a great system bus and a stable, proven OS. AMD64 and IA-64 are just too recent, and there's just to much MS there.
I could see Sun migrating to, say, POWER. But even there the benefits would be doubtful. The real benefits would perhaps come from fully supporting GNU/Linux as an alternative on par with Solaris.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin