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Sun Sacks UltraSparc V and 3300 Employees
bender writes "According to this article, Sun Microsystems has cancelled the next generation UltraSparc V processor even though the chip had already taped out. Perhaps this has something to do with the recent partnerships with AMD and Fujitsu?"
First they settle with Microsoft for $2 billion, and now this. Are things really this bad for Sun?
Not much to say here. They'll be gone within 2 years. Without Sparc platforms, they're just another maker of x86 clones.
Money talks, Sun employees walk.
"On the other hand, the cancellation underscores the difficulties Sun has been facing in the difficult world of chipmaking."
Doesn't that just say it all?
Wireless News www.DailyWireless
This is most unfortunate since the UltraSPARC line was extremely efficient. Under heavy loads even an UltraSPARC II with 128MB of RAM could outperform an Intel chip with ten times the RAM.
Sun cannot compete with Linux/AMD64. Hopefully Microsoft did not buy IP ownership rights for Java, because Sun ought to open-source it before the company expires.
To either make Java OSS or sell it to IBM?
There's not much left to recommend these guys...
what...you choose them because you want solaris? I think not.
And I've geared my companies entire strategy around Solaris. I feel really stupid now.
They couldn't get Windows to run on it.
Anyway, I'm very happy to see that they are not planning on putting out an interim processor. I wouldn't take kindly to that as a consumer or enterprise buyer (I've been both).
As a consumer, I don't want to buy something with only a 2 year shelf life (less used product will be available in the future). As an Enterprise buyer - they won't have all the bugs out due to low volume.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
"Perhaps this has something to do with the recent partnerships with AMD and Fujitsu"
microsoft
From The Register Yesterday: Sun shelves UltraSPARC V in favor of the great unknown
This seems like old news to me. I seem to recall Sun saying they were not going to produce their own chips anymore, and just use AMD 64 chips. I recall this happening ~6 months ago.
I hate sigs.
You forget that Fujitsu is making top notch SPARCs. So maybe they are just joining forces?
I'm sure they'll just hire in about 3,500 H1-B's to replace them. :-/
The guy has been eating words faster than any of his chips could run Java. I hope he's got a lifetime supply of Rolaids.
They didn't cancel the line... Read the article. Development will continue on the UltraSparc IV core.
I once worked for US West (a local phone company) and they had entire ROOMS full of nothing but SUN equipment - actually running. I worked in IT for them and I still can't imagine what all of these systems did.
Anyway, the article is pretty clear that the new Chip platform is simply being eliminated because it's a needless step inbetween their IV and the new processors that are lining up for release... in 2 years.
So I guess this means I'm feeding a troll that didn't read the article.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
I just got this message from kerio firewall... what the fuck is slashdot/osdn trying to do?
I'm no physicist, but I think the technical term is "serving images." Many web sites do it nowadays. Perhaps you should uninstall your so-called "firewall" and experience the Internet in a less-broken fashion.
Over beer, this is the way my friend and I see the future:
.NET to Solaris. Mono dies swiftly.
0. Gosling leaves Sun for IBM.
1. All Sun hardware will run on AMD
2. Sun will port
3. Java bytecode will target the CLR
4. Sun/MS/HP vs. Intel/Dell/IBM/Linux
5. Apple keeps innovating
The Register has it here. Sun Kills off Sparc V and Gemini and releases Niagara and Rock. Not as big a deal as most of you make it out to be.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
World leader in bad jokes eh...
Every time I think of Sun, I think about my commute home past their headquarters. In the summer of 2001 (if memory serves correct), I drove by via San Tomas and saw a tree in one of those planter boxes - like the wooden boxes that trees come in when you buy them from a nursery.
This tree was a HUGE oak tree though - had to be 100 feet tall at least, with a trunk that was probably 5 feet wide. And it sat there in a big planter box waiting to be "planted." The transportation costs alone must have cost a fortune.
The point is, while the industry began plunging into the abyss, Sun was farting around buying full-blown oak trees to make their campus look "pretty" - while other companies were working to stay afloat.
It seemed then that they had their blinders on, and while a fair amount of companies are stabilizing now here in the valley, they seem to be trying to stop the bleeding a bit late.
Perhaps if they'd spent less time farting around with building campuses and more time on building their market, they'd be in better shape. After all - if you let your employees go, who's going to look at the trees?
Just a thought... it seemed symbolic to me of what was wrong there - perspective. Shame though... they're so much more likeable than MS.
Please, if you're going to enourage your readerbase to read an article, please do the same.
Sun said nothing about laying off the Ultrasparc V or Gemini staff.
"Sun plans to lay off 3,300 employees, but many from the UltraSparc V and Gemini projects will remain at Sun, the spokeswoman said."
But the sparc *line* is to continue.. they are just having some really rough financial times, and don't want to waste money on 'incremental' chip releases.....
Which is good, it means we still have 2 choices for desktops and servers out there (MIPS are long dead, and it seems ARM's are going to be only seen in embedded devices and handhelds... )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They are getting ready to layoff 30% of their staff, not 9%
After the election, HP and IBM will be doing some as well, but it it unknown how much.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Those who read the article will see that this is far from Sun getting out of the chip business and moving to Windows, but rather a retooling that will allow them to return to profitablility in the near future. Instead of the UltraSparc V, they're going to stick with modifications to the UltraSparc IV for the time being while they work on putting out their multicore followup, the Nigara. Personally, I'm glad to see this. Sun has been a stagnating company in the hardware department for a while now, and I think a good shakeup is what they need. There will always be a need for the rock-solid server market that they fill, and x86 just doesn't cut it in a lot of cases. So, don't worry, Sun isn't going anywhere, and if they did, someone else would step in to fill their place (and it wouldn't be MS &/| Intel).
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
Sun's boxes are usually blue and purple.
BTW, am I the only person that thinks Slashdot's one sided "sun is dying" post is an attack on Sun? They settle with MS and the OSS crowd turns their back on them almost over night.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Don't confuse the CPU a system uses for the entire performance value of the system. There are different bus and memory architectures that can do a lot to differentiate the performance of a "pricey" Sun with an AMD and the "value" machine you'd assemble from commodity parts
SGI did this with Pentiums (II's or III's if I remember correctly), though a lot depends on marketing which has not beeb SGI's strong point as of late so don't site SGI as an anecdote to predict Suns failure also.
Did you ever wonder why no one sells x86 servers with more than 8 CPUs, and ones over 4 CPUs are extremely rare?
Well, one reason is the x86 architecture doesn't scale with a crap in a multiple-CPU box. (It is, after all, nothing more than a calculator chip fed steroids and gamma rays...).
The UltraSPARC architecture, however, can scale damn near linearly to at least 100 CPUs or so.
It would be more accurate to claim that "x86 can't compete with SPARC in a massively parallel environment". It does remain to be seen how big that market will be...
I like the way that Microsoft has a hand in every bit of computing news. They get a win, they planned it carefully. They lose, it's part of some farsighted strategy.
The bottom line is that Microsoft produces products that people, lots of people, want to buy. And they are aggressive marketers. That's as far as it goes IMHO. No need for convoluted conspiracies.
You mean here
Another story is here, which explains things a bit more clearly.
"Then, in late 2006 and 2007, the company will release Niagara, a multicore, multithreaded chip."
Sun will somehow finish a significantly more complex processor when they give up on this one? IBM, AMD, and Intel will be four times ahead of Sun in three years. By killing the UltraSparc V, Sun has to execute perfectly in an arena they've stumbled in the past.And another group of several thousand highly-qualified people lose their careers! Just what society needs! Another example of how hard work and dedication just don't matter any more.
Oh, and don't forget to "keep your skills current."
"So, what was your last job?"
"I was a microprocessor designer."
"What makes you think you're qualified to work at Lying Rat Bastards Inc.?"
"I have a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from Cal Tech"
"Well, unless you graduated last year, I'm afraid your skills aren't current. Thanks for stopping by."
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Those developers deserved to be fired, not graced with a lay-off. They were a couple years behind schedual. AC Sun employee.
It's /. ... sometimes they don't get that they are creating innuendo. The title doesn't -say- that the 3300 employees have anything to do with the USV halt, it just allows for the connection to be made.
Sad thing is, the 3,300 layoffs were announced at the same time as the Microsoft deal last week and the MS deal just took the lion's share of the press.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Then if they do switch, do they get in bed with the Itanic which they are already trying to bail water out of or do they step in to a pit fight and go to x86-64 or do they go to their enemies and use PowerPC? That's really about the extent of the options, I can't imagine them on IA64 and I can't see them winning in x86 space.
SANTA CLARA, CALIF. - April 10, 2004 - Sun Microsystems, Inc., is pleased to announce their intention to expand into a whole different market with their new line of chips, labelled "SUN potato chips 1000". This new product is a direct response to the fritolay product with a similiar name. "We expect to have instant brand name recognition with the top consumers of snack products, primarily made up of computer geeks" one company spokesperson said with the condition that he remain anonymous.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
If you consider "aggressive marketers" a synonym for "criminal monopolistic extortionists".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Now we'll only be able to imagine a beowulf of these. Farewell, we hardly knew thee.
Sure, they probably have no-compete contracts, but those generally expire after a short time. Short enough that they could reasonably "not compete" whilst they make a Sparc VI "clone".
There'd probably be a lot of interest in them working on the LEON II, too. Picture the next generation of high-end supercomputers inside satellites... (Shielding is equally effective, whether on the chip or on the outside.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
These are big, generally single threaded applications. In 2001, we used Suns becuase they supported memory sizes we needed. Gate simulation needed about 5GB of physical memory. P&R more like 10GB. For smaller jobs, we used x86 boxes. They wern't just cheaper. They were faster.
But now EDA vendors are starting to support AMD64. With Sun's announcment, the performance gap is going to get wider. No Ultrasparc V. Niagara and Rock won't help, even when they get here.
"The technique, which won't result in chips larger than those from competitors, sacrifices the ability to perform one task extremely quickly for the ability to do multiple independent tasks simultaneously"
No good. No good at all. How long before Synopsys, Cadence, and Magma do the unthinkable and actually drop support for Sparc/Solaris?
"Sun plans to lay off 3,300 employees, but many from the UltraSparc V and Gemini projects will remain at Sun, the spokeswoman said."
If many will remain then some will leave, no?
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
My father was a lead designer for the Ultra Sparc V which has been in development ever since he joined SUN 7 years ago. Yes, they canned it even though the prototype was all done and ready to be sent for intensive testing. It is true from what my father told me that the project was running slow, especially in the past year or so, but it was very inconsiderate of SUN to chop off a project that was almost ready. How would you like it if you've been working on the same thing for 7 years just to see it get trashed just because the company thought it wouldn't succeed? At least he still has a job unlike the 300 engineers who got laid off in the same building (the one in Sunnyvale, CA that is pending for closure).
Those in charge of sacking the Sun Ultra Moose V have been sacked... ...Those in charge of sacking the previous sackers hav enow been sacked as well. The processor race will now end in an entirely different manner from the way in which it began.
Sun actually SHOULD get out of the chip business and turn a profit for once. Either that or stop thinking their chips are worth what they say they are.
I first thought, "About damn time", unfortunately, the article made me realize it's more of the same crap from Sun. Lay off employess, not admit defeat, repeat.
--SuperBug
Sun is going to rely on AMD.
But AMD is a close partner (or in the pocket of) Microsoft.
So Sun is putting Microsoft in control of Sun's base hardware.
It doesn't look like a wise move to me.
If those 3300 employees just kept their skills up to date and stayed ahead of the curve they wouldn't have been sacked! It won't happen to me I'm too skill3d!
The problem with naive college geeks is they don't realize layoffs are not the same thing as getting fired.
You get fired for being incompetent, you get laid off because the company needs to beat quarterly earnings estimates...
(Hint: the client is the guy who sent the SYN, and the server is he who replied with SYN-ACK)
Many will remain at Sun.. that means some will be leaving Sun. The headline is accurate.
John Susek
Slashdot has always bashed hard on Sun. Despite all the anti-Microsoft crap here, deep inside everyone knows that GNU/Linux was born into the world in order to replace UNIX, not replace Windows. Plus, you've got a bunch of winer kiddies who complain about the lack of bash and so on.
They didn't give up on it... they finished it.
.5Million just for the mask set.
Not quite. Big chips almost never work right the first time. Minor design changes are always required. Best case, Ultrasparc V was months and millions of dollars away from done. Each "spin" throught he fab is
I suspect the situation for Ultrasparc V was worse than that. If they had truly taped out then the chip would already be in the fab. More likely, the database was in condition that it could have been fabed but it was not meeting performance targets.
"We have no Linux strategy. Linux sux!"
"We love Linux, so we are slapping our brand on SuSE Linux, and calling it JavaDesktop for no good reason whatsoever, and will get rich, rich I tell you!"
"We want EVERYONE to use Java. Oh, pay no attention to those hoops over there..."
"We hire the greatest talent in the world. Our employees are our most valued assets."
"Microsoft is our arch-enemy."
---
SCO is weenies
Gator is Spyware
Microsoft is thugs
You know when you come out with a blurb like that, I don't think "Wow - this guy has worked with some awesome big iron!" - I think this is a guy who thinks people actually give a fuck about that kind of thing, when in fact they don't.
Congratulations nerdo.. pull your overinflated head from out of your ass.
Those trees were for the RiverMark development across the street from the Sun campus (nothing to do with Sun's campus). I watched them dig them out of the field and put them in planters (used to live over at Mansion Grove on Lick Mill Blvd & San Tomas/Montague); they were just being moved while the RiverMark construction took place. There was a huge field there with nothing but a couple of beautiful old oak trees that is now full of houses, shopping center, etc... I was quite impressed with the developers for taking the time and expense to save those great old oaks.
Frankly, I think that's a good move for Sun.
It costs a LOT to outperform current top cpus (Xeon, Opteron, PowerPC, etc.). Sun money balance is already in deep sh*t, I don't think they can afford to put money on a brand new architecture, they must consolidate, it's sad but true.
He's not kidding. Sun has repeatedly been late to market with their "exciting new chip technology", business plan designed to force customers away from the older software base and onto the newer OS and compiler releases.
Then companies like Fujitsu and formerly Tatung repackage the newer hardware without the unfortunate design compromises that made the new boxes undesirable (such as the RAM limitations and insistence on out-of-date bus technologies), port the old software to the hot new cheap box, and sucks up all the money Sun was expecting.
Where I work we used Sun because of performance in the beginning, then because Solaris was superior to Windows. With the advent of Linux, the only reason we've kept them around is 64-bit address space. I really don't see what they offer over a server-class Athlon-64 running Linux. Except a price premium.
As far as services are concerned, they really put a big hole in their own foot. The multiplatform nature of Java prevents them from keeping a vendor-lock on customers the way IBM has with its mainframes. We can trasition any recent project to other hardware at any time.
Define "many".
l s_ us5/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/09/sun_kil
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15222
It's cool to fight microsoft but not practical. Especially when you have a group of people trying to destroy your company by badmouthing you on the internet because they figure if they can't take on windows, they'll take on solaris.
Sad to think that all that money Sun invested on behalf of the OSS community only bought them animosity and a massive FUD campaign. I wouldn't' be surprised if IBM was behind it.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Did we read the same link?
It starts with
"Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun has stopped work on the UltraSparc V, a server chip"
The key here is: "Stopped work on"
And if you're doing chip design and want to run a Verilog RTL simulation of your chip, then what's faster:
(1) a single CPU Opteron box (about $5k)
(2) A Sun 15K with the above resources
If you answered #1 you're correct.
So much for Sun's EDA market. Just take a look at NVidia's server room over time to see the trend.
Things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise.
If it wasn't for Liberal votes in the governments they answer to, they'd have mulched those oaks.
Just as a side note. On the night of April 8th I submitted a story regarding the availability of Java Studio Creator. That never showed up but post something bad about Sun and it's there... even if an article on the same subject appeared yesterday.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Whatever, you can buy a HP "Superdome" Wintel box that blows away the Sun E15K.
Sun is strange. They've always been that one company of whom I've never been quite certain what to think, but always desired to root for (if only on behalf of Java). And now Sun appears (to me) to have been seduced by Microsoft and then willfully gutted. ...And I would've bought a SPARC when the time came...
If this isn't a kind of decline for Sun, I certainly hope they have one hell of a plan up their sleeves.
Ultra-Sparc is alive and well! If anything, Sun seems to be freeing up some engineers to work on the more promising future versions. As long as these extra hands and eyes don't slow things down (now, who's law is that?), this will probably be a good thing.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by cluelessness."
:-)
Or something like that.
Slashdot's always been a master of the latter, so...
I'm never sure what to think of Sun -- almost every job I've had for like the last 20 years has used Sun servers; I've learned to hate their software for its cruftiness, and their hardware's damned slow, but man are they reliable! And hey, no Windows (not a joke, really: at stodgy companies they're often the one thing that keeps alive the notion that there are alternatives to microsoft).
[BTW, your post spawned an impressive number of trolls in reply, it's like they were just waiting...]
We live, as we dream -- alone....
The PrimePower 850 just blew away the V880, even with 2 less cpu. The PrimePowers use Sun Solaris and are 99.9999% * compatible because (I didn't realise this) that Sun do not own the Sparc design, Sparc Consortium do. I do not believe that Fujitsu will buy Sun outright because they simply do not have the money and have been doing lots of expensive merging of various subsidiary companies this year to save costs; e.g. the old ICL has become Fujitsu Services along with some other straggler companies including Fujitsu's Sun reseller company.
I would say that Fujitsu PrimePower are about 1 year ahead of Sun in terms of power & speed and in our tendering process were a lot cheaper as well.
Probably worth mentioning that I didn't buy Fujitsu in the end because the machines were not certified to use Oracle RAC - instead, I went for HP (linux) - the business benefits for linux outweighed the change from solaris.
* PrimePower won't run SunCluster - that scared me a bit about fujitsu's compatibility claims.
typical sparc apologist drivel.
the sparc _needs_ hardware contexts and register windows because it has a zillion registers to save and reload.
the x86 on the other hand has very few registers, so saving and restoring them on context switches is very cheap.
and since x86 cpus are so much faster than sparc now, sparc gets left in the dust.
They were really the first major EDA vendor to support Linux on x86 servers for their tools. There's a huge installed base out there for Suns, so they won't be going away right away. However, with the increasing complexity of designs in terms of parasitic extraction (i.e. 0.13um and lower starting to use RLC instead of RC) and simulation, which is typically single threaded and highly dependent on processor speed, Suns will slowly go the way of the dodo in the next 3-4 years.
All we REALLY need are server suppliers who are able to include some of the better functions of the Suns, e.g. on-call engineering support for hardware failures, redundancy and hot-swap capability to name a few. That will pretty much be the nail in the coffin IMO.
Or buy an IBM p690 32-way that will blow away your hp superdome.....
My first real computing experiences were on Sun hardware. I've logged lots of time in front of Sparcstations up to E6500s and dozens of E450s. At one point, I thought Linux was a fad because it was so amateurish and unpolished compared to SunOS/Solaris. I still know more about SunOS/Solaris than I do about Linux. What a difference a few years makes...
I think Sun started dying when they started to push remote framebuffer devices as a viable business solution. Besides costing more than a PC, it required extensive reworking of the network in many cases. They killed off (then brought back) Solaris on Intel when sticking with it might have slowed down Linux adoption in the data center (people looking for cheap hardware -- PC servers -- are generally not looking for Sun boxes). Sun was riding high on the dot.com and Y2K booms but they were too slow, too entrenched to react when the landscape changed. Their hardware can no longer keep up with equivalent priced Intel machines with equivalent availability features. Hell, even the Apple machines are eating into traditional Sun markets in research and academia. Why? Their low-end, slowest machines are still $1,200 more than Apple or Intel.
Don't get me wrong. I liked Sun and still do. I want them to survive not only because it makes my skills more valuable, not only because they were largely friendly to open source, but because they have developed some cool technologies. But they have to change. Maybe these moves are a good thing (they can't be worse than the previous path). But they have to do more: quit being so wishy-washy with Linux (either embrace it fully or compete against it); make Java easier to install on Linux (I don't care if it's opened up or not); make Solaris9/Intel as functional as the Sparc version (where's SMC? At least make a Linux SMC client); lower the hardware prices to be more in line with the industry (even if this means putting together an IA32 or IA64 machine).
or a bunch of g5's that will blow all of em away ;-)
This whole article is incorrect.
They discontinued the UltraSPARC VI, and are proceeding with the V.
N
I was an engineer at Apple in the mid- to late-nineties when rumors were rampant that Sun would buy Apple. Scott McNealy was once quoted as saying that the only reason he would want Apple was for the office space.
:-P
My, how things have changed!
Not that Apple didn't deserve criticism in that era (I worked for a successful project that is still underway, however) but there were some damn fine people there that didn't deserve to be ridiculed.
Pardon me while I enjoy a certain amount of schadenfreud at Sun's expense.
And yes I feel terrible for the Sun people that were let go, its a rough market right now and they are (as I am) just pawns to the powers that be, that don't have any compunction about playing with peoples' livelihoods. I have no ill will towards the workers at all, just toward their executives.
To me it looks like a conservative move: concentrate on something that's simple and elegant which gives more total performance at the same clock speed. Get it shipping with good yeilds, then ramp up the clock.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Guess Sun is following their way.
BTW, their processors have sucked for quite a while now, they were getting server performance from "the power of many" (i.e. by putting lots of processors in SMP or SMP/NUMA configurations). AMD's Opteron beats the crap out of a Sparc IV (with server benchmarks), it's just that there aren't solutions for more than 8 chips on a board for AMD (AFAIK)
The Raven
Except sun IS DYING. Slashdot is just pointing out this fact. Sun has issued a earnings warning, projecting a lost 810 million dollars in their 3rd quarter. This is in comparision with other tech companies who are finally starting to say the economy is starting to come alive. Sun's been trying desperately to reinvent themselves as a "software" company. They have put a large amount of money into GNOME, and have been trying to get it back by selling a rebranded GNOME. They have refused to opensource Java. They have finally committed on some Linux. And they have paid SCO Group millions of dollars to help continue the war on Linux. Sun fanboys just need to face reality, and realize that Sun isn't the company they were during the dot com boom. Their hardware now compared to the competitors is not that great. Now we have Sun saying they are trying to make money by selling operating systems for Walmart machines. Guess what, Walmart is the king of being efficient. So is Dell. Sun is neither.
bollox. I think it went more like this:
'you know guys, you spend HOW MUCH!!!! on custom hardware? for f*cks sake, why don't you just buy some opterons?!'
Its not as if the competitive advantage of your own hardware brings much nowadays - once, when chips were slow, but today with xGhz chips being sold for peanuts, Sun might as well pack in the hardware business completely.. or devote all its money to competing in that market. I don't think it can do both hardware and software effectively.
... taped out, an expression that means the design was complete. (In the olden days, when engineers completed a chip design, they sent the computer tape out to other groups.)
Err, what? I thought this bit of jargon came from the process of creating a photomask by manually applying tape to a pane of glass. Am I mistaken?
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
Another interesting point is that the SPARC64-V was made almost exclusively by native (Japanese) engineers. Fujitsu, as a matter of traditional Japanese corporate policy, does not hire H-1B workers.
Sun hired hordes of H-1B workers. About 66% of the people who worked on the UltraSPARC-V were former/current H-1B workers. This observation proves the fact that H-1B workers are not needed to create high-technology.
Here's the sweetest part: Sun will sell re-badged Fujitsu servers, starting in 2006. I know. I work in Sun's server department.
Taped out? Is that anything like a tapped worm?
We run 15 different Fujitus PW frames here; from 800's to 1500's. They are interesting animals and certainly faster than comparable Sun frames but it's their memory access on and across system boards that give them the kick - not so much their CPU.
On the support front - Fujitsu front-line support *SUCKS* where Sun's is actually pretty decent. Not as good as Auspex in the old days, but still decent.
What a bunch of horseshit. Keep your dumbass political views out of this.
The UltraSparc V, which was based on a different design than the UltraSparc IV, would have required Sun and its customers to adopt, and then phase out, an entirely new chip in the course of a few years. Server customers tend to try to minimize technology transitions.
This is probably the real reason behind the cancellation -- moving to the UltraSparc V would have obsoleted the installed base of software (or at least would have required code changes to get the benefit of the new architecture).
And then the article goes on to say that after all those customers port their software to the V (at some huge expense), they'd have to port their stuff again to the next generation of Ultra Sparc processor. No wonder it was killed -- IBM learned that lesson back in the System/360 days. The last thing you do is prevent existing programs from working on your new machine -- because at that point the customer will say: "Well, we have to rewrite our code anyway, let's see what other hardware vendors have to offer."
Chip H.
It seems Sun is on its way to either make themself irrelevant or kill themselves. First, they sell their soul (IP) to Microsoft. Now they smacked their brain (SPARC). It's truly sad since I admired their workstations. I think that McNealy concentrated too much on Microsoft, forgetting to form allies with other MS enemies. For example, Sun never tried to get Java and StarOffice to run on Mac OS X. Apple had to implement Java themselves. Think how much help Sun can get from linux and Apple. Didn't we see that with Netscape, too? They wrote great Mac OS and Solaris versions until they concentrated on Microsoft that they released buggy, slow crap on Mac OS. Not only did they lose Windows users, they lost many Mac OS users unnecessarily too.
so, as somebody who used to work on the US-5...
:)
as i AC-posted above, UltraSparc V did, in fact, tape out (sometime in the last month, or so). supposedly they actually pulled some wafers off the fab line last week.
the project was a couple of years late. it was supposed to tape out last summer, and that was the second estimate after the first one didn't look possible. there were a lot of very, very smart people working on that project, but management was a bit misguided. as one of the mid-level engineers, i'd blame that mostly on the fact that a lot of our lower-level managers were high-level engineers who were yanked up into management positions. but that's probably just my personal bias.
the cool thing, from my geek perspective, about the chip was that it was truely multithreaded - one core that could be run as one pipeline for apps with greater internal parallelism, or as two pipelines for more throughput. unfortunately we ran into a lot of technical problems making the multithreading work efficiently - that was a big part of what i was responsible for while i was there
Sun plans to lay off 3,300 employees, but many from the UltraSparc V and Gemini projects will remain at Sun, the spokeswoman said.
lower level management (project director level) is much more pessimistic; they expect less than half of those laid off will stay with the company.
anyway, i was pretty suprised when they axed the entire project, but i guess with all the talk about "throughput computing" (read: processors composed of lots of simple cores stacked up side-by-side with shared caches) it shouldn't have shocked me.
Before you buy Fujitsu you might like to ask them about their own future.
Fujitsu no longer have a license for future version of Solaris, so unless you're happy to buy hardware which in only a few short years will have no OS support, then I'd probably suggest looking elsewhere.
are you kidding? a G5 is a dumbed down POWER4
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
Ok - here goes my carma, but I just have to say it.
The cancellation of UltraSparc V is probably a good thing for everyone. US V was to be a new design, not fully compatible with the old ones, but instead leaning towards Itanic. This is good, mainly because it means that they will continue to focus on Sparc compatible chips. This means more stable hardware for us. Also this means that they will continue the focus towards multithread/multicore chips - which are terrific for server usage. KISS design, the way it should be done.
The alliance with Fujitsu is definitely a good thing. Fujitsu has great potential as a chip maker, and their Sparc CPU's are just as good as those made by Sun. What's bad is the supporting logic (Fujitsu-Siemens sparcs have limited LOM and are more expensive). This "union" if it happened would probably mean that we would see future sparcs with the best from both worlds.
Even the MS "pact" is not bad. It gets more money to sun, so that they can continue with the work, and shows us the perspective of using Sun instead of MS software for our server, while still being able to support MS clients. This would allow us to phase out MS from the corporate server pool easily, and also open room for Linux and other unices on the corporate desktop. Weather we like it or not MS is the current office standard and it will take us a lot of work to get it out of there. Not for the "office" (i.e. word, excel) but for the "groupware" software as the main backbone (outlook, exchange, and the new products).
The only "bad" thing is the layoff of 3000+ workers from the US, and the potential move of sun's cpu production from T.I. (and the US) to Fujitsu. And this is noting bad for the computing industry. It is bad for the US economy, but that's just the US. The rest of the world - and the unix community will probably end up benefiting from this.
I own a SunSPARC 10. It's a work of art. Sometimes I pull the cover off just to look at it. But what Sun is doing now just stinks, you watch, a few years down the line, Windows will be a standard option for a Sun box, and Sun will just be another Intel pltform.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
the ultrasparc V did tape out, and the chip was in the fab. they pulled wafers off the line last week.
Ouch. So, did it wiggle? Or is that something we will never know?
If big old tress had a decent chance of survival after being moved I might be impressed. Typically old trees to not survive moves well, so why bother?
Are you talking about the rotating register file? Sparc has a large collection of registers, of which a subset are addressible by the register-register instructions at any given time. You can move the window (which determines which subset is visible) with single user-mode instructions, which typically are used on entering and exiting procedures. They are aligned so that one chunk of the set (8 regs) is shared between a caller and callee, which makes for very efficient parameter passing.
In the days before out-of-order superscalar execution, I ran timing experiments comparing this system with comparable RISC processors without this feature. If you like to write programs with lots of very small nested functions, then the reduction of function call overhead can be significant, as much as 2x improvement. It's much less of an issue on modern CPUs with out-of-order execution, as the stack area used for parameter passing will generally be sitting in the L1 cache, close to the CPU.
I don't see your point about process switching. It's not much of an issue for ordinary systems. A process switch occurs, what, like every 10ms? Saving a few dozen load and store instructions might save you 10-20ns? BFD.
Don't forget Sun Linux, which was repackaged Red Hat..
In a trivial way, I suppose SuSE *is* more Java than Red Hat.. they do ship the JVM with SuSE Linux Professional, after all.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
A while back, Sun was claiming that it was going to release Ultrasparcs that could do asynchronous computing - different parts of the CPU would not rely on the same clock. Anyone know what happened to that? Is that in one of the future chips mentioned in the article?
What they are doing is simply a change in strategy, and the right change IMO. Sun hasn't been competitive in raw number crunching and single-threaded performance for quite some time and the UltraSparc V wasn't going to be enough to save them. However they were spending a LOT of money to not be very successful. Sun had the second largest CPU development team in the world after Intel, yet companies like AMD and Fujitsu were producing faster (single-threaded) processors for much lower costs. In other words, it just wasn't working for Sun.
What IS working for Sun is multithreading performance. The UltraSparc IV now gives them up to 144 processor cores in a single image system, only SGI is doing more. They combine that really good I/O and solid software support and you have a pretty good solution for a high-end servers. It's not a very good choice for supercomputer-type applications (that's what SGI is after), nor is it very good for workstations, but Sun was getting killed in those markets anyway.
This announcement also ties back into the deal with AMD. While Sun hasn't been doing a very good job for workstation and number-crunching chips, AMD IS doing great here. The Opteron is a great chip for these sorts of tasks and fills in many of the wholes that could potentially be left by the death of the US V. Now all Sun needs is to get the software support up to par for x86-86 Solaris (as well as Linux and maybe even Windows) and they'll be in a reasonable position.
In short, in my mind this is the right decision by Sun. The only thing that I think is bad about it is that they waited so long. IMO they should have killed of the US V a couple years ago!
Yeah, they didn't say anything about it, but they did lay off the entire Ultrasparc V group on the east coast. That was a sizeable portion of the design group.
Long-term, Sun is doing sparc processors like SGI is still doing high-end MIPS. It's on life support. This is hardly different from when Compaq killed the Alpha architecture. They just put a different PR spin on it and haven't owned up to all of the facts yet.
This observation proves the fact that H-1B workers are not needed to create high-technology.
Neither are Americans...
Actually the next server processor (aka. "data facing") will be Rock, not Niagara. Niagara will be a "network facing" chip (mainly for web servers and similar stuff, as it will have really poor FP performance).i s/solaris_guarantee.html), Solaris avoids this problem from scratch.
Rock will have the a ability to create two threads from one (some sort of "thread level paralellism", besides the clasical ILP), in order to maximize CPU utilization. Dont forget that Solaris has the most advanced thread implementation on the planet. They will laverage this advantage.
As for workstations, chances are that they move back to a third party processor (probably Opteron) as they did with the original Sun 1 (a Motorola 68.000 based workstation), back to the roots baby!
Im really expecting wide Solaris Opteron support from ISVs, since this will easy worstation deployment for end users. Nowadays, for Linux, you have some ISVs that only supports RedHat 7.3 (Landmark, etc.), while others supports SuSE, forcing end-users to have dual-boot or vmware implementations in order to mantain ISV support for the high-priced software (petrol apps, etc.). Whats even worst, is that is common for new libraries to be incompatible with old ones (glibc 6.22 and 6.23 and more) what forces ISVs to perform extensive re-certification. Thanks to binary application guaranty (http://www.sun.com/service/support/sw_only/solar
I still thinks that Sun drop the ball with many bad choices, but replacing US-V to with a extremely different processor (as Rock) is the best way to cut through the chat. Either Sun will raise or fall from this desition. If it really works, a Rock + "asynchroneus logic" processor will position them on a hole new game, forcing all other competitors to perform an expensive (time & money) catch-up.
If it fails... I doubt services will save them. As my father once told me when he was CEO of a service (telco) company "To the customers eye, service is always bad. After they get used with any new improvement, they will start to complain again requesting some further improvement, until their complain is solved, then the hole thing starts over again." Thats why long term out-surcing contracts tend to end really baddly. Is not the quality of the service, is human psiquis...
Thats why Sun, beeing a engineers company, will be far better with serving value added products (with huge differentiators) than services.
I once thoug Sun would ship a 100% GPL server, but they didnt understand the market impact that kind of product will create. Just think it for a minute, SPARC is the only widely used 64-bits open processor (http://www.sparc.org/faq.html), just GPL the UltraSPARC-IIe processor, add Linux on top of it and you are done, the ony 100% GPL server on the planet!!
It doesnt matter if it sells well or not (look at Linux on zSeries), you are the only system provider that can guarantee the customer wont be lokc-in. If every-thing goes wrong and Sun dies, you can still create faster UltraSPARC servers, without any restriction that commonly applies to Intel clones (Intel sueing every x86 clone maker, etc.).
Looks to me like we're witnessing the beginning of the end of Sun as we know it. Sure they may stick around selling el-cheapo boxen at WalMart, but that won't be the company we knew as Sun.
Linux could have perhaps saved them if they had made the right decision way back, but it would've taken a lot of balls to make Linux primary and drop Solaris to 2nd place.
Must-not-watch TV!
At least in my time zone it is...
Totally agreed!!!
But I get bad karma for all of my Sun flaiming...
"If I was smarter I could rule the world!"
Seems more likely, since he's using a Mac these days.
We just had bids in from a few Fortune500 computer makers; HP's support of Linux is what pushed is in their direction. We couldn't use the ICH5 sensors with our deployed system and an HP engineer actually wrote C code to fix it for us. We could have done it ourselves eventually, but knowing that our vendors know Linux that well made us happy. It made them happy too because now we're going to deploy 15,000+ HP boxes running it.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Sun for $2billion.... oh they called it a settlement....but then again isnt that how M$ settles things.
. I love the sound of burning women and screaming rubber....
Thus they are easier to replicate. Exactly how they do so is irrelevent... I dont think Sparc International shares around chip design but chip specs.
I was at a Max Planck Institute in Germany for two months last summer. Our computers were from Sun and, did they suck! I hate CDE!
I went to Linux Tag in Karlsruhe (2003) and talked with some of the Sun employees at their booth. They were mostly clueless. Most of them had never heard of gnome (and CDE seemed like a foreign idea). One guy knew something about gnome but had no idea when it would be available on Sun's in Germany.
By the way, why is it that you can say (in German) "How warm is it?" and people will understand you but if you say (in German) "How hot is it?" they just look at you like you are crazy?
Several universities I'm familiar with used to use Suns for all their web- and mail-servers, but they're for the most part switching to x86, because it's simply a lot cheaper---and faster. Replacing a 4-year-old 300 MHz CPU Sun server for an $800 dual-2GHz CPU box from Dell works wonders for responsiveness of the IMAP server. The newer Sun hardware that can compete at that level is far more expensive.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It's never good when someone decides to work with microsoft, because you can't work with microsoft. You can only work for them and for yourself. Anything they do for you will be contractual and if the contract leaves them a way to get out of it they will...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's not a bunch of horseshit.
Do you think for one seconds that the people who own companies there care about trees?
People who care about anything don't build strip-malls.
Everyone keeps talking about Sun "working with" Microsoft. I just don't see where this is happening. I don't see "settling a lawsuit" and "partnering" as being the same thing at all.
If you're talking about the cryptic "IP cross-licensing agreement", then why aren't you spitting the same venom at Apple? Because they signed such an agreement with Microsoft as well when they settled their lawsuits against Microsoft in 1997. I don't see this cross-licensing as "working with". This is just an "okay, no more lawsuits" agreement. Sun hasn't given up on fighting MS, they've just given up on fighting them in the courtroom.
Am I missing something?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
You forget that Sun got this land from the city of Santa Clara. The city required Sun to support development for the community. Keeping the old Agnews buildings spending tons of money remodeling. Keeping a portion of the property as a public park and other landscaping. (i.e. that tree was part of it.} Providing subsidies for the housing/marketplace development on the adjacent land.....
Was she in the same delegation going to Japan, or was she working in Japan? If it's the latter, I'm really impressed that both of you were able to sense the chemistry so quickly, and that the two of you were willing to make a leap of faith that things would work out.
With great power comes great fan noise.
The other day I was watching the 2( Scott & Steve ), rubbing their shoulders, suddenly thro' their Detriot connection.
.Net in Mars and Pluto for customer's, to think as an impossibility to integrete.
:- Integration of J2EE and .Net is only on the paper. I can bet that Sun will spend more money on RnD than Microsoft, on headaches of J2EE compliance with .Net, then the other way.
:- This is the best part of the deal. Star-office( with this open source flavor Open-office ) is a _definite_ threat to Microsoft Office. The bad new awating is the death of open office. Wait for that day open developers.
:- with one hand shaking MS, do you think that Sun can have its involvement( however little it is today ) down the years. No way.
The best part of that joint-announcement was when Scott said "we're still going to be competitor's and are going to innovate".
Give me a break !
There hasn't been a company as Sun, so vocal about Microsoft, in all these years. Infact, to a greater part, their fear and extreme animosity was one of the key factor for them to develop/invent with such vigor, what ever they've done in all these years.
Suddenly comes a Friday, "oh we've decide to bury the hatchet, recall our Detriot years and we're working for the Customer's" - please
1. Was the customer invisible in all these years ?
2. If you had _suddenly_realized the impact on customer's, why didn't you talk to Microsoft or WS-I, in the 1st place.
3. Were J2EE and
This is a golden deal for Microsoft. Kudos to Steve and Bill( or in the _old_ Scott's words, Steve and the butt head ).
There are being hammered in EU. If they completely loose that, Sun would eventually win big-time. Not to mention, down the years, Sun _will_ find some mischief from Microsoft and will try to suck money thro' law-suits.
The best part of this deal is in 3 vital areas, Java and Office application's...
1. Java
2. Office
3. Sun's presence in OSS space
An alliance with Sun, not only they've silenced their most vocal critic, but they've hit a home run by a slow poison on Sun's office application( both Star office and Open office ).
After getting Money with a "10 year understanding", saying that we're still going to compete is just BS.
"Necessissity is the mother of compromises too".
Sun badly needs cash to barely stand up. Scott realized late that he can't run, with the less amount of energy, churning out his factories. So he decided to "switch sides". Its unbelievable that he still want's to hold the post, while Rich Green( who was one of the principle witness in the MS anti-trial lawsuit ) left the company in disgust( how many paper's covered that news ).
The chair is always attractive isn't
In all these years, 100's and 1000's of those who stood behind Scott, in all the fights against Microsoft - whether it is Java or Solaris or Office application, will feel stranded.
When you can't believe your commander-in-chief, what's the war worth ? and why was it fought, in all these years ?
"One more proof that money, or the necessissity for it, can even turn sworn enemies to friends, overnight"
This is true of UltraSPARC-IV, not UltraSPARC-V.
Sun's UltraSPARC-V was going to be a traditional continuation of the SPARC line vis-a-vis bigger faster more Hertz. Sun's next generation processor is going to focus on non-traditional approvements vis-a-vis multi-core processors like 2, 4, 8 processors on a chip. Something like 7 CPU cores for ALU and 1 CPU core for FPU or 6 ALU 1 FPU 1 IO core.
Dubbed Throughput computing.
and the OSS crowd turns their back on them almost over night
/. and other places on the net? People who considered themselves to be 'principled' vis-a-vis giving credit where credit is due literally stood in line to verbally piss in Sun's cherios at the time.
Damn, the history books have been revised again. I hate it when that happens. Not overnight folks, never was anything but history once it happened.
Sun's reputation among the OSS crowd went in the toilet and was thoroughly flushed when they tried to convince the world that the output of the Blackdown Group in developing the java runtime was their own work, back in what, 1999, maybe even 2000 when that brouhaha lit up the posts here on
That was so microsoftish an attitude, with McNealy playing the NIH syndrome to the hilt, and only slightly mollified me when they finally did admit that Blackdown had something to do with it. That admission struck me as being exactly what MS would have done, and soured me on Sun for a long time. I suspect that much of the OSS crowd has a memory, and has a wait and see attitude because of that incident. Obviously, enough of that and sales go in the toilet too.
IMO Sun has no one to blame but Sun. Yes I applauded them in their battles with MS, and they could (and IMO should) have won rather handily if we had a working court system in this country, but sadly, we've amply demonstrated we don't when it jumps to do dubya's bidding within a month of his taking office.
Anyway, I sincerely hope the laid off people can find other equally well paid work in a timely manner.
Bah. Its Easter Sunday, and supposed to be a joyous occasion. So be joyous, thats an order now, y'all hear?
Cheers, Gene
From a marketting standpoint, the i860 was unsuccessful. From a technical standpoint, it was perhaps a decade ahead of its time. As one of the first VLIW architectures, it had poor compiler support because the state of the art hadn't yet caught up. We recently replaced a legacy system based on the i860 with PowerPC's and found that we needed 1 GHz G4's before we could catch up to the performance of 80 MHz i860's. Granted, the i860 code was seriously hand-tweaked assembly versus GCC compiled C code for the PowerPC.
The horseshit is that liberal/conservative rarely means anything in the city planning process.
Are you so certain Linux doesn't run on these boxen? Linux runs on everything else (including stock sparc and sparc64 processors). Linux scales much better on non-x86 processors than on x86 processors. You can read about it here:K 19Dh01.htmle t/reports/509 6/1/
(256 processors)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/E
(512 processors)
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplan
Based on current revenue, analyst have been suggesting headcount should be around 10,000 The big challenge for Sun is transitioning from a systems company to a software company. That's a big change.
Remember... Fujitsu bought Ross Technology and HAL Systems (sparc shops), and possibly Amdahl (not sure...) All US companies. Fujitsu has had a very large investment in Sun since the company broke up into planets. Fujitsu is huge, at least 70 billion dollars a year. They would be a very likely candidate to acquire Sun. And just to keep things in perspective, if not for Sun acquiring the Sparc unit of Cray from SGI, they would not have had the big iron for the dot com era and either would have Fujitsu since they are Sun's largest OEM. You are way off on the H1-B topic... too!!!!
IBM still makes a ton of money of their mainframes and their sales are still rising
I am not disagreeing about IBM's hardware sales, but IBM has become a services company, and they leverage services to sell the hardware.
According to this report of IBM revenues, services were $10.4B of total $21.5B for 2003Q3. Almost half the revenues are from services, and the profit margin on services is much higher than the margin on hardware.
This year-end report states that all hardware sales increased, including the mainframes (z-series). But it points out that services revenue grew 17%, while total revenue grew 10%. Do the math. That means the non-services business only grew around 3%. If that trend continues, then in 3 years, service will account for 3/4 of IBM's revenues. Aren't statistics wonderful? While the growth of services may not be maintained, selling hardware keeps becoming more difficult, so these numbers are possible. The first report states that hardware revenues declined 1%, so you guess if IBM's hardware business is actually growing.
---
Software is included on the non-services half. The report states that IBM's software sales have flat-lined. If hardware revenues declined, then software must have grown some to offset the hardware decline to reach the 3% non-services growth. Most of the increase is because IBM keeps (successfully) pushing WebSphere, which competes against free software.
New business model:
1. See Free Software succeeding.
2. Develop proprietary version.
3. Use marketing and support organization of very large company to sell it.
4. Profit.
(I dislike business plans that include "and then a miracle happens". My current startup is depending on several of them, and they will give me ulcers, especially since I am expected to provide the miracles.)
The one real advantage of pushing WebSphere is that development is so complicated that IBM sells more services. IBM stopped pushing Lotus Notes because development is so easy that your receptionist can do it, so it generates much less money from services.
IBM has not been pushing Lotus Notes recently. That may change soon. Lotus Notes dominates because it allows business people to create business applications easily and quickly. Notes 7 will allow the use of DB2 as the internal database structure. Then it can scale to almost any application's needs. It could also mean easy use of DB2 for mobile applications. If they can maintain the ease of development, Notes could take a significant portion of the application market from MS and Java. The issue is whether IBM will market it well. They spent most of the last 7 years positioning Lotus Notes as a competitor to MSExchange. Notes is a much better email system than MSExchange (try administering/supporting both for a while), but Notes shines as an application platform, and IBM buried that message in the competition with MS for number of email users.
-- Back to SUN
My first thought was that the deal with MS included unwritten conditions that SUN would stop selling hardware that could not run MS software. Then I realized I was being completely paranoid, because even if Scott has absolutely no idea what to do next, he would not give up the Sparc for just $2B. Right?
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Computer is a commodity - Joe Blo average can stop by Frys and put together a 64-bit system that is comparable to Sun. Unfortunately, the enterprise market that Sun depends on so much is literally blow up last couple years. Hell, my computer at work is 4x slower than my home machine. Corporate bean counters want every pennies count so they are not buying new hardware. Beside, the world need the next tech hot stuff. We dont seems to have any lately.
My reference to the UltraSPARC-V is correct. Although it was not yet a product when McNealy canceled it, the UltraSPARC-V would be competitive with products of 2 prior generations. UltraSPARC-V was late by 6 years. When it would have finally appeared in 2006, the ultraSPARC-V would be competing with Power6 and SPARC64-VI+.
Just prior to McNealy's cancellation, the UltraSPARC-V was still vaporware. In a comparison between vaporware and SPARC64-V, the SPARC64-V wins. Why would Sun waste addition millions of dollars to complete a processor that would only be competitive with a current real processor, the SPARC64-V.
It's a single core POWER4 with less cache but Altivec added. It also flies!
Sun hired hordes of H-1B workers. About 66% of the people who worked on the UltraSPARC-V were former/current H-1B workers. This observation proves the fact that H-1B workers are not needed to create high-technology.
This only proves that foreign workers are not required in Japan.
My other first post is car post.
Actually, it doesn't. Move of the SPARC64 group are ex-pat engineers from Silicon Valley and Colorado..
Or at least, they were last time I visited about a year ago..
Maybe this indicates the USA has a shortage of native-born engineers of sufficient skill and Japan doesn't. This would seem to be a reason to call for better education rather than castigate Sun (as the parent post seems to imply)
From what my high school German teacher said, when using the word "hot" you have to pretty much tread on eggshells because about the only thing that can be considered hot is a person's body. So, depending on your exact grammar, you might have been asking them how hot you are.
Remember, this is just pure speculation and I'm not talking from experience.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
For AMD to compete in this space, it requires better motherboards and chipsets. It will happen, but it won't be cheap.
As far as software is concerned, it really isn't about Java. It is about Solaris, and there Linux is already getting many of Sun's enterprise level advantages, give another couple of years and it will have most of them. (courtesy of IBM amongst others).
The OSS crowd hates any successful enterprise.
Sun, Microsoft, IBM, nVidia, you name it.
You can't be very successful or very rich; very much like in communism.
Another interesting point is that the SPARC64-V was made almost exclusively by native (Japanese) engineers. Fujitsu, as a matter of traditional Japanese corporate policy, does not hire H-1B workers.
I'm calling bullshit on this one. The SPARC64-V architecture was created at HAL corporation which was based in the Bay Area but owned by Fujitsu - Most of the engineers were in fact not Japanese. The chief architect was Mike Shebanow who went to AMD after HAL and then left AMD recently for NVIDIA I believe.
Sun's processor architecture team sucks because they are clueless when it comes to high performance processor design. The UltraSPARC IV is still an in-order machine! It's 2004 for Christ's sake and they can't figure out how to build a competitive out of order processor.
Your H1B comment is a red herring. Intel, AMD and IBM hire tons of H1B workers too, and their processors kick Sun's ass.
The decision SUN made to abandon their
Sparc-V chip in favor of the Fujitsu
part is good news. The death of a
chip line, however, is not. Is SUN
relinquishing their IP and technical
edge by (effectively) out-sourcing their
processor development to Fujitsu?
I, for one, am not unhappy to see SUN
(or any other USA company) cast off some
of their H1-B employees. But these
engineers will not be replaced with
Americans, but with an entire Japanese
company. Long-term, this does not bode
well for SUN (or for American ingenuity).
Hopefully, SUN will use the respite to
build new processors (and servers) here
in the USA. Unfortunately, the deal with
Microsoft would tend to indicate that SUN
will be a slowly diminishing box-mover.
Focusing on competition at the bottom
rung (against Dell and HP) is an act of
self-depreciation, and a no-win situation.
It may be too early to proclaim "SUN is
dead. Long live SUN!"
As a system programmer (yes, some of us are still out there!) I think this is a good move. :-(
I don't like the idea of switching architectures, and maintaining the old sparc is what i'd like to see.
Especially if it seems to yield better performance than the new chip.
The AMD move was necessary, sun has to offer low end solutions, that's obvious.
I think sun should focus on building better software, I really like solaris, it's a great OS for C developers, and solaris 10 is a big step in the right direction.
All in all, i'd say that a careful analysis of these news should do good to sun's stock, but judging from the messages here - I think this will not be the case
I love burekas in the morning
While you're correct that Sun started out with workstations, they've been doing big iron for more than five years. The telco billing project I worked on for six years launched on Sun servers several years before I was added to the project.
The problem is that the title misleads -some- into thinking that the USPARC-V stoppage is what caused the 3,300 to leave.
... internal speed tests against the USPARC-IV and Xeon are quite impressive for AMD (can't cite a link since it was an internal test).
... in the new case if everyone is "perfect" then 10% go at random) ... making it oh so much easier to find the 10% layoffs ... just a guess though since they announced the layoffs 2-3 weeks before they are telling us exactly who is going (which once again has people fearing for their job for weeks ... Sun needs to figure out that you should have an idea of -who- is going before you make announcements).
In truth, the layoff was announced the week before the USPARC-V stoppage and most of the CPU design teams will be retained. Both the layoff and the stoppage are continuing evidence that Sun is realigning itself with the new market. Plus Sun is beginning to seem more and more happy with the AMD 64-bit chips across the board
Want my guess as to how many CPU team members will go? 10%.
Sun has a fairly new policy that forces managers to rank on a Bell curve where exactly 10% of the people across the board get the lowest rating (used to be a rating system where you were ranked on merit in general, not in comparison to your cow-orkers
SPARC64-I, SPARC64-II, SPARC64-III, and SPARC64-IV were all built by HAL corporation. They all sucked in performance. Horrible designs.
After SPARC64-IV, Fujitsu shutdown HAL. Smart move.
SPARC64-V was entirely designed and built in Japan.
Gosh. Here is the key paper by Fujitsu. It describes the SPARC64-V. The paper indicates that all the architects were Japanese.
Stop YOUR bullshit.
NT just didn't cut the mustard, and the transition backwards from 64-bit MIPS to 32-bit Pentium was too much of a regression. itanic was late, too hot, underperforming (due to the weird architecture and poor compilers).
The market voted with its wallet.
By the time Rocket Rick was sent packing and SGI got a clue, it was too late. MIPS had languished for too long and when they restarted development it was just too backward. The world (including UltraSPARC) had moved on.
To replace the dud that was Windows NT they needed a UNIX. Unfortunately, IRIX had been suffering bitrot and was showing its age, so they got on the Linux bandwagon.
Now, SGI is even more of a niche player, selling very slow 64-bit MIPS workstations and a very small handful of largeish parallel itanic boxes running Linux with proprietary closed-source kernel modules to achieve the parallel scalability. These monsters are big, heavy, hot and expensive.
What a sorry tale.
Sun has not drank that itanic Kool Aid nor the NT stuff and is keeping Linux on the desktop and 1-2 way server where it belongs.
Stick Men
And if you're looking to move 90 people from Los Angeles to San Diego, then what's better:
(1) An Airbus 318
(2) A Boeing 747
If you answered #1 you're correct, but it rather blatantly ignores that the 747 isn't the only airplane in Boeing's portfolio, and that it was designed to do other things than one-hour shuttle runs.
Comparing a Sun 15K to a 1P Opteron to run one task is patently ridiculous. There are SPARC-based systems that come in at way below $5K -- they might still be slower than the Opteron in terms of raw processor performance, but the comparison is more apt, and they might bring other aspects to the solution that make them the better alternative in many cases. The 15K is going to be used in places where an Opteron box, or a few racks full of Opteron boxes, just aren't going to cut it.
Moving up the food chain, the same SPARC IIIi processors in a four-way or eight-way configuration own that market segment -- it isn't all just about single-CPU performance.
And of course, all this ignores the fact that you could buy the Opteron box from Sun, and run the app on either Linux or Solaris. (Or you could run a few hundred of your EDA jobs on the 15K and get better efficiencies of administration, thermals, server room footprint, resource management, and so on.... .)
Oh, I don't know. Sun dissing OSS for the last 10 years or so in one way or another does not build good feelings, either.
You're not the only one to try to force me to be joyous today, but you are the first one to do it in jest.
Where do I find confirmation of your claim that Fujitsu won't be able to run future versions of Solaris? On the machines that they're designing and selling to customers now!! This doesn't sound right.
Did I really see the phrase, ``Niagara will begin to trickle across the Sun server line''?
I want to be a bored tech writer, too!
In the US, very few find science or technology interesting career choices. The only way the US can compete is through import of skilled workers.
It might be best for the world economy if US stopped the import. It would mean development of new technology would move outside the US, first through outsourcing.
Of course, outsoucing could be outlawed too. Then the US would end up as technological backwater. Which would mean non-technological industries would be unable to compete as well.
Oh, I thought it was the new UCSD Pascal...
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton