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Oracle Won't Abandon SPARC, Says Ellison
fm6 writes "When the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems was announced, it was widely assumed that Oracle was interested only in Sun's software technology, and would sell or discontinue all its hardware businesses. Larry Ellison, in an interview just posted on the Oracle web site, says that's not what's going to happen. In particular, SPARC isn't going anywhere (PDF): 'Once we own Sun we're going to increase the investment in SPARC. We think designing our own chips is very, very important. Even Apple is designing its own chips these days.'"
Servers were Sun's highest margin stuff? No wonder they plummeted and got bought.
I said highest margin products, meaning not software or services. The SPARC line of servers is higher margin than their x86 line.
Sun's services revenue has grown to be almost what their products revenue is over the years. While they're not as big as IBM Global Services, the combination of Sun's services and Oracle's will give them a leg up.
Dual Opteron < $600
The last year or so, Apple has been putting some serious effort into custom chip design, purchasing P.A. Semi and hiring key design guys from IBM and AMD/ATI.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Sure. ARM is not a single processor, it is a family of processor pieces. Companies license the various pieces from ARM, and put them together in any way they want. Thus you can get a cheap, low power ARM that only costs a few dollars, or you can get more powerful chips. You can also tweak the design in weird ways like reversing the byte order. You can get some that carry their RAM with them on the same chip. Thus the ARM in the iphone is different than the ARM in the Kindle which is different than the ARM which is in the doorknob at the hotel.
So the fact that the ARM in your computer is slow is no reflection on every other ARM (also, if it is really that slow on the command line, the problem might be you don't have enough RAM. Realistically the command line was supported by chips running 1 at megahertz. You might want to check to see if stuff keeps getting swapped out). ARM can be fast or it can be slow, it can be anything you want it to be. It is a much more flexible design than the x86.
Qxe4
Moore's law involves transistor count, not clock speed. Note the graph in the WP article.
But I agree that the infernal P4 got the industry to rethink clock speed as the be-all and end-all of microprocessing. Leakage at 90nm and below was a big problem, too.
I said highest margin products, meaning not software or services. The SPARC line of servers is higher margin than their x86 line.
It better have damn good margins. Intel, and to a lesser extent AMD, can amortize their R&D and fab costs over a zillion units. Meanwhile, last quarter Sun sold 60000 servers, 28000 of which were x64, leaving only 32000 SPARC systems. Again, of the SPARC systems $500m revenue was for the Sun-Fujitsu SPARC enterprise products using Fujitsu SPARC64 chips, and $300m revenue for their own Niagara systems. So yeah, with those revenues they better have damn good margins if they are going to spend more than a pittance on R&D.
It wouldn't surprise me if they sell the rest of the SPARC chip business to Fujitsu pretty soon, provided Fujitsu wants it. That doesn't of course mean they would be killing SPARC, just that they'd be expanding the current Sun-Fujitsu deal to cover all SPARC chips.
As for Ellison's comments, his job at the moment is obviously to convince Sun shareholders to approve the deal, some of which might well have some sentimental attachment to the SPARC business. I wouldn't trust what he says wrt Sun for one second, at least until the deal is through.
As for services, with hardware increasingly commoditized, that's the obvious way to go. It's no surprise that the remaining survivors of the unix wars, IBM & HP, are both heavily into services.