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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?
"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
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.
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.
You forget that Fujitsu is making top notch SPARCs. So maybe they are just joining forces?
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.
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.
Suns were fast not because the UltraSPARC chips were really good (they actually kinda sucked) but because of the insanely fast memory and I/O busses in a Sun machine. UltraSPARC being canceled is actually a good thing. It lets Sun concentrate on making good machines, and leaves the CPUs to companies who are good at making them.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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 ----
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."
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.
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.
They didn't give up on it... they finished it.
On the surface it seems silly to cancel a chip that was basically done. The vast majority of money put toward a chip is in the design, not the manufacturing. But when looking at the potential of having 7 different chip architectures in the marketplace at the same time in a couple of years, it really makes sense to simplify the product line a bit. Keep the tried-and-true, and finish the biggest capability jump. They just cut out an intermediate step.
I'm staying with US III machines for the next couple of years. In two years, say there was a new chip out that was only a littel better than the US III, and the Niagara coming out within months... I'd certainly decide to wait for Niagara and make the biggest jump possible (so I could sit on it a while). I suspect they'd have hardly sold any USV machines.
Yeah, I wouldn't be suprised to see the "Java Desktop" move over to Solaris in the future.
However, it's too late for mindshare -- the market now thinks of Linux as the hot new thing (rather than risky and hackerish as people did 5 years ago), and it's unlikely that an improved version of Solaris x86 will change that.
As a side note, Solaris x86's worst enemy was always Solaris Admins (who love Sparcs, the firmware, etc). They bashed hard on the product, when they could have been it's biggest proponent.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
So, it wasn't the processor specifically, but THE ARCHITECTURE BUILT AROUND IT? For crying out loud, if the supporting architecture doesn't actually support you then you're not doing so well.
Additionally, the UltraSPARC processors weren't as fast as x86 but they scale much better and have no end in sight, whereas the x86 can't compete in large multiprocessor systems and are starting to show future caps in terms of power, heat, and size. Sun isn't as concerned with higher speeds so they don't get whacked with the same problems, but make a more efficient processor.
UltraSPARC being canceled is actually a good thing. It lets Sun concentrate on making good machines, and leaves the CPUs to companies who are good at making them.
The UltraSPARC isn't being cancelled, the mark V is being cancelled.
As well, who should we point to as good at making processors? Intel created a very poor design which they been able to keep pushing on quickly. They stay focused on releasing newer and faster models constantly, but the design is much poorer and has to constantly kludge itself to keep going. Intel captured the low end market and used that to push itself into higher end systems, but they hit bottlenecks that a better design could have avoided. They are not someone I would hold up as an example to be followed.
Someone asked if I had patched against MSBlast; I said yes, I installed Linux.
There is a flaw in your reasoning. HP is one of the biggest supporters of Linux.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.).
Personally, I very much doubt that company would total net reduction of 30% over next financial year. If they tried, they might as well liquidate company's assets right now and give proceeds to shareholders. That's where Sun's current value is (share value fairly close to book value, that is); to get more share value via growth, company HAS to continue spending on R&D... and that can not be done by firing 30% of employees during next year. It's hard enough to grow by 30% over couple of years; reducing by that amount in one year is only done on death spirals of companies when all other options have been exhausted. It's like amputating your left leg, instead of liposuction, to lose more weight.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
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