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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?"
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.
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."
You mean here
Another story is here, which explains things a bit more clearly.
I agree -- Sun was doing so well during the dotcom days that they totally lost track of their competitive position in the market.
On the high-end, the death of SPARC was a long time coming, yet Sun continued to plow massive amounts of money into a chip that was not competing with POWER etc.
On the low-end, they didn't do anything about the growth of Linux except diss it. Had they positioned Solaris x86 strongly against Linux back in the RedHat 5/6 days, they would have killed alot of Linux's market growth -- remember back in 1999, UNIX was the "safe choice" and Linux was not. But Solaris x86 was so obviously an orphan product that nobody took it seriously.
Instead they spent a lot of time bashing Microsoft (not their #1 competitor) and farting around with things like StarOffice. And planting trees.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The vast majority of money put toward a chip is in the design, not the manufacturing.
The intro only talks about it being taped out. That isn't the end of the design effort. In fact, that's when the really expensive validation work begins. Now its true that the amount of people (and thus salaries) goes down, but the really expensive validation phase ususally consumes more than half the R&D of a development. Heck, a single machine configuration to run benchmarks runs in the Millions of dollars (US).
to the Engineer, the glass is neither half full nor half empty. Its just two times too big.
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.
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.
The Mono JIT on SPARC passes all the tests that the
Mono x86 JIT passes.
A lot of the recent focus has been on taking
advantage of many of the SPARC v9 features
(like branch prediction) and improving the code
generation after the initial feature complete
stage.
I'm sure someone on /. has said that many times over, but it's not at all the case.
For those who are too lazy to read the article, Sun is NOT killing off the SPARC line, they are NOT discontinuing all their CPU production and they are NOT switching everything to AMD64 chips.
What Sun is doing is finally putting an end to their rather unsuccessful attempts to produce a single-threaded raw number crunching chip. Sun hasn't been successful at this for some time now (certainly since at least the UltraSparc II and probably for a while before then) and the UltraSparc V was just going to be another failure in this regard. No one buys Sun's for their raw number crunching performance anyway (since they stink in this regard), so this is really a pretty bright move by Sun. Really it's something they should have done a while ago.
The plan going forward is for Sun to work to their strengths. Their CPU division will produce highly multithreaded chips that are designed for server work, ie the sort of stuff that people buy Suns for in the first place. Their workstation line will be replaced by AMD64 systems since EVERYONE is moving their workstation line to x86 anyway. The only thing holding people to Sun workstations (and IBM or SGI workstations as well) was the lack of 64-bit capabilities on x86 chips, but that restriction is no more.
Sun will still need some SPARC workstation products for a while going forward to support customers with legacy Solaris software that can't easily be upgraded though. If they are smart, what Sun will do is buy some SPARC64-V chips from Fujitsu. This gives Sun faster chips for much lower cost then developping their own.