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Sun to Merge UltraSPARC with Fujitsu's SPARC64?

Posted by michael on from the dying-gasp dept.

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.

2 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. This would make a ton of sense by nelsonal · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  2. Linux.. by BrookHarty · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.