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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.
I wonder how Sun is going to get out of this long term contract with TI... otherwise, I don't see how this new merger is going to really help Sun.
Davak
Who says they have a long term contract?
The section of the article quoted above doesn't say anything about it.
will they name the new company Sun-tsu?
I believe that TI and Sun had developed a relationship with TI's production of the 90-nanometer chips.
Anyway, there is no doubt that the relationship between TI and Sun has been locked in for a long time. Sun breaking away from TI would most likely be very damaging to TI.
... Their multi-core CPU plans.
It does seem like Fujitsu has the edge with
their SparcGP4 chip...
CINT2000
Company System Results #CPU
Fujitsu Limited PRIMEPOWER650 (1350MHz) 905 776 1
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V880 (1050MHz) 626 560 1
CFP2000
Fujitsu Limited PRIMEPOWER650 (1350MHz) 1340 1096 1
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V880(1200MHz) 1082 923 1
It seems that Fujitsu is not confirming that the two companies will "broaded this relationship." See quote below.
Too much news being leaked? Or is there another reason to not confirm this at this time?
They might be doing Linux, but they are certainly not keen on the idea and are only doing so because their customers keep asking for it. Well, at least they are listening to their customers I suppose, so there is that, but it still feels to me like Sun has seriously lost its sense of direction recently. I suspect a lot of FUD filled editorial is going to be written under banners like "Has the SPARC gone out for Sun?" real soon now.
Still, at least Apple's star seems to be rising at the moment. ;)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
But I thought Sun didn't have a Linux strategy...
Obviously they do have a Linux strategy, in the same sense as MSFT has a Linux strategy.
Perhaps they can now focus on expanding their co-operation with SCO.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
I hope this isn't the only iron in the fire fort Sun.
As others have mentioned, it will ruin their good relationship with TI.
Also, it's doubtful that special purpose RISC chips can provide enough in the price/performance arena to keep from having their market share continue to decline, as it has for the last 10 years or so.
Low end Linux servers is a dangerously competitive business for Sun to be in, but it's a growing business and one where they have much to offer.
Fortunately, if Sun "doesn't have a Linux strategy", Dell, the 800 lb gorilla, is still half-napping, too. Dell's support of Linux is weaker than that of rivals IBM and HP, plus their potentially missing some nice opportunities by actively ignoring non-Intel x86.
Sun should climb on board the AMD Opteron with Linux. They are a company with the experience and credentials to create a quality piece of hardware and have the UNIX background to cover the software side, too.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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.
.. 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?
Anyone?
I give it a week, two max from when it's officially announced.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
and brings market share back up, it will really be the land of the rising Sun...
Twin or more? ITA
Apache/Spring/La
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.
There's no reason why TI couldn't keep making the UltraSPARC IIi, IIe, II, III Cu, IIIi, IV, IVi CPUs for quite some time, as the UltraSPARC installed base is very large. Chips like the IIi and IIIi probably give TI much more volume in the long term than the III Cu, anyway. If Sun and TI do break up it would be more of a weaning than a pushing overboard in the Arctic.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I have a tinfoil helmet too! Can I play?
Obviously Sun is soon going to be selling 64-way itanium machines running 64-bit Windows, while SCO kills of any semblance of UNIX, BSD and Linux business out there to let Microsoft rule the world, once and for all.
The plan is nearly complete.
Stick Men
UltraSPARC not 64 bit? Since when? We have Ultra1 machines running Solaris in 64 bit mode. SPARC was 32 bit, UltraSPARC is 64!
Stealing a rhinoceros should not be attempted lightly.
My only question is who.
I could see IBM or Motorola or HP or Fujitsu as strong candidates to take over sun. Besides Sun's large bank account, they dont really have much going for them in the long run. Unless they use that money to come up with some awesome marketable product, they are done. But they have so many patents and such a large install base I just cant see them closeing shop entirely, someone is gonna pick them up. The question is who and when.
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.
The originally proposed quick fix is to simply redesign the the Sun servers to accept the SPARC64-V. An even better proposal, now leaked by the press, is to simply discontinue the Sun-designed servers and to sell re-branded Fujitsu designed servers. The latter proposal is a much faster path to solving the server-performance problem at Sun but leads to lower profit margins. Clearly, the situation at Sun is dire, so you can be assured that one of these proposals will be adopted. (Please read "Sun posts deeper loss for quarter". Having lower profit margins is better than having no profit margins. Right now, the second proposal appears to be winning.
Sun Microsystems will most likely fire more than 50% of its processor development team. The single biggest cause of Sun losing marketshare so rapidly is the UltraSPARC III. It has horrible performance. Check "SPEC" and "TPC".
How does this deal help Fujitsu? It can now sell more servers and get more cash. Fujitsu has the upperhand and should force Sun to accept the second proposal: Sun exits the highend server market and sells rebranded Fujitsu-designed servers. To avoid being dependent on Sun, Fujitsu should move rapidly to jettisoning the Solaris OS in favor Linux. Fujitsu is rapidly being shaped into a company like IBM: high-performance servers and computing services are the mainstays of the business.
As a side note, Fujitsu rejects hiring foreign workers (the equivalent of H-1Bs). Their SPARC64-V and SPARC64-VI were designed and built almost exclusively by native talent. When Fujitsu hires workers, Fujitsu most values the quality of "willingness to work", not "best match of skills"; Fujitsu will take the time to train its employee. Fujitsu is a traditional Japanese company that emulates most of the values that once characterized traditional American companies. Sun, by contrast, encourages the employment of H-1Bs; the UltraSPARC III and the UltraSPARC IV were built substantially by former or current H-1B workers. Sun seeks only "best match of skills" and, along with Intel, claims that they absolutely need H-1B worker even during a period of 8% unemployment among native Americans in Silicon Valley.
Where exectly did i claim that UltraSPARC was not 64 bit? Where did you get that from?
The article i mentioned shows pretty clearly that on a diagram SPECfp vs SPECint for a the common 64 bit processors there are two groups. For brevity, let's call them "fast" and "slow". Intel, AMD, PPC, Alpha, and SPARC64 are in the "fast" group, UltraSPARC and the others are "slow". Let me quote the author, Paul DeMone:
His statement may be a little blunt, but it is true that Sun servers used to outperform intel-based Linux-servers. They no longer do, and the market has noticed that. If Sun wants to sell hardware in the future, they'll have to correct that.
Please RTFABYP next time, will yer?
You realize that your pasted definition of "affect" has "effect" used as a verb, no?
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.
Well, I'd argue that performance of a CPU is but a single indicator of it's overall worth.
That said, suggesting that Sun won't be able to sell hardware in the future with their SPARC processor based systems is a little short sighted and misses some key points.
Firstly, Sun is a very capable company when it comes to building systems that have more CPU's then their x86 competitors. We have 2 E4x00 machines with 12 CPU's each and they run like clockwork. Finding intel machines with many more than 8 CPU's is a challenge, and even if you do, you're crippled by the fact that the scalability is pretty much non-existent past 4 processors... especially under Windows NT. Linux isn't much better at larger CPU numbers, although I understand this is being worked on actively.
AMD has been able to correct this with the Opteron CPU's, but I have still yet to see a 12 CPU'd Opteron machine... though I'm sure someone will build one eventually. Itanium on the other hand seems to have better scalability than it's x86 grandparents... but nowhere near the almost linear performance increases seen in UltraSPARC based systems.
When you're around larger iron as much as I am, you quickly learn the value of having many relatively fast CPU's instead of having 2 or 4 really fast CPU's... with the dynamic reconfiguration ability of a good Sun machine, you could even lose 2 CPU's to a hardware failure and still have the CPU power to accommodate your customers.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2