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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?
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.
From The Register Yesterday: Sun shelves UltraSPARC V in favor of the great unknown
You forget that Fujitsu is making top notch SPARCs. So maybe they are just joining forces?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Has Netcraft confirmed this?
Those developers deserved to be fired, not graced with a lay-off. They were a couple years behind schedual. AC Sun employee.
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
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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"
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
How many H1-Bs can you fit in a rackmount server?
Karma: Contrapositive
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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