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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?"
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
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.
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.
"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.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?
I wish you hadn't posted AC, though I understand why. I bet I know you, if you work(ed) in Sun Burlington. A lot of people there have privately expressed that sentiment to me. And there's a lot of truth to it based on my personal observations.
I've been working with the HESE (High-end Server Engineering) group there for almost 4 years making ASIC support chipsets for this cancelled SPARC program ("Eagle"). We had already taped out one, had the first design for another cancelled two years ago, and were 70-80% done with it's replacement (they switched from InfiniBand to PCI Express, which was smart, but resulted in tossing away about $80M in development and lots and lots of cancellation fees from my company.)
ASICs that should have taken 8-12 months tops were scheduled for 2+ year development cycles, then Sun's delays stretched that out even more. It was frustrating for me, since I spent a lot of time waiting for netlists and constraints, and aside from 2-3 key (lower-level) people I worked with who were competant, I saw so much waste and stupidity in the Sun management organization that I often got mildly depressed about it.
Their management is sorely lacking in hierarchy -- there are dozens of people with power to influence any decision (they are "stakeholders" as Sun calls them) yet never any one powerful enough to make a final decision, and many of these folks are too smart for the company good. Rather than pick a workable implementation and go with it, they would have meeting after meeting for months arguing about which way was "better". There was never any "main manager" who would step in and halt the endless nitpicking and force a decision. This delayed projects to an almost silly degree, and it's hard to believe how incessant it is unless you see it yourself.
So, just about everyone I worked with in Burlington was laid off. Some were given the chance to move to California to work on the SPARC stuff still going there, but most of their managers advised them that this program will also be cancelled within a few years, so unless they just wanted to go to California (few do), they should take the severance and run. Everyone I know did just that.
So, now the project I was working on for Sun that was cancelled and revived slightly differently once, is now completely cancelled. My company still got paid, but nothing like what we would have made had we gone to mass production (though even those forecasts were dropping steadily every year before cancellation). Worse, we had 60+ engineers in Japan and four here in Mass. devoted to Sun, and we even turned down some projects last year because we didn't have the engineering resources to handle them. Now we wish we had those back, and our sales staff are hustling to bring in some more work.
It just makes me sick, since I always thought of Sun as the great, innovative company, and I was so thrilled to be able to work with them (at first), and now they fall apart in front of my eyes.
On the bright side, I did get some great free trips to Japan and Australia on a extra-juicy expense account during the initial design win when we were wooing Sun every-which-way. Even met my wife on one trip to Japan. So it's not all bad for me, but it sure sucks for Sun.
everything in moderation
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.
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.
Eh? The UltraSPARC performed very poorly on things like SPEC, that were mainly CPU benchmarks. However, Sun machines generally performed well in real-world server scenarios, where the better architecture made up for deficiencies in processor power.
Additionally, the UltraSPARC processors weren't as fast as x86 but they scale much better and have no end in sight
How well a CPU scales is more a function of the machines memory and bus architecture than the CPU itself. x86 CPUs like the Opteron can scale very well --- its just that Sun machines are much more commonly equiped with the cross-bar memory controllers and other system support that you need to get a scalable machine.
whereas the x86 can't compete in large multiprocessor systems and are starting to show future caps in terms of power, heat, and size
I wouldn't compare SPARC so much with x86 as I would compare it with PowerPC, the former Alpha, PA-RISC, and Itanium. Relative to the other major RISC architectures, SPARC CPUs themselves were never very impressive.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
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).
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.
I'm trying really hard to remember a case where a company stopped "fighting MS and start(ed) working with them" and came out a winner in the end. Dell and Intel might be considered successful partnerships with Microsoft but they are partnerships in name only since Microsoft tends to dictate all the terms and conditions.
t ly _dumps_windows_opengl/
SGI tried to stop fighting and work with Microsoft on Fahrenheit among other things. They pretty much cratered the company in the process. Not sure anyone remembers Fahrenheit, but it was an attempt to develop a next gen 3D API beyond Direct3D, OpenGL and Performer. It became very obvious from day one that it was mostly designed to divert SGI's attention from backing OpenGL against Direct3D. SGI was dreaming of defining the 3D standard for all those millions of Windows desktops. Microsoft wasn't concealing the fact that everything going on there was irrelevant unless it could be shoehorned in to Direct3D:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/29/ms_quie
Microsoft simply DOESN'T work with its competitors. It very rarely works with its partners. Its partnerships tend to be a smaller companies who think by partnering with Microsoft they are going to be "made men" in the mafia sense of the term, but at some point if the project is successful or not Microsoft will, one way or another "whack" the partner. The one strategy most likely to lead to a desirable outcome is for the small company to sell its assets to Microsoft, probably for less than they are worth, but still make a tidy profit and run.
Microsoft seduces, it bullies, it uses slight of hand misdirection, it uses, it simply doesn't partner. One thing Scooter used to have right at SUN, you either fight Microsoft or you die, the only other viable strategy is to look small, don't get to profitable, and hope Microsoft doesn't notice you before you cash out.
@de_machina