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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.'"
"Even Apple is designing its own chips these days."
Unlike Oracle, I think Apple is traditionally a hardware company.
I wish them the best carrying on the Sun baton.
For many years, there were a multitude of different architectures, and all of them were supported by major software developers. Over time the number has gotten smaller and smaller, the only one used in typical desktop computers anymore is the x86 (mainly thanks to Intel investing mountains of money into the manufacturing process). Unfortunately for Intel, manufacturing isn't the advantage it once was: AMD is still able to compete with them moderately well even when they've been a generation behind in manufacturing. Other things are coming into play besides raw processing power, things like power consumption and battery life.
Intel is going to have trouble competing on battery life with ARM, or even PowerPC. Going into the future, we are going to see more ARM based netbooks (and they are going to be more usable), and the already common ARM handheld device is going to become more powerful. Suddenly there is going to be a need for software that runs on more than one architecture again. This is a good thing, in my opinion: it means x86 will not necessarily be the dominant processor forever into the future.
Qxe4
People have been saying for years that we're about to reach the end of the line in terms of Moore's law. So far they've all been proven wrong, and scaling continues unabated.
Unless you know something I don't, you can't make a silicon wire smaller than the width of a single atom, so there is definitely a physical limit that we aren't that far away from. I've read that practically, the limit is 4nm for silicon nanowires. That means that if we're at 45nm today (Intel's 32nm chips are slated for 2009), and we're assuming size shrinks 50% every 18 months, in less than 72 months we'll have reached the practical lower limit for silicon features. Even assuming that you can make silicon chips with wires the width of a single atom, given that the atomic radius of Silicon is 110 pm, that only gives 144 months.
In addition to that, at 3.2GHz, light in a vacuum can only travel about 9.36 centimeters per cycle. Given a dialetric constant for the Si02 used in chip manufacturing of 3.9, you can calculate the velocity of propagation of the electromagnetic waves through the Silicon as about 50.6% of C. Therefore, at 3.2 GHz, the electromagnetic waves inside the chip can only propagate about 4.7 centimeters per cycle. You also can lose a bit depending on the switching speed of the transistors, but they actually become faster the smaller they are, so the real limiter is the propagation speed.
You've probably noticed that we haven't had any really major jumps in the clock speeds of consumer processors since about 2002. Intel originally thought they'd be able to scale the Pentium 4 Netburst architecture to about 10GHz, bu they ran into a frequency ceiling at about 4GHz.
In short, unless there is a major materials breakthrough, or materials change, I would expect Moore's law to hold for the next five years or so, but not much longer after that. We're rapidly approaching the physical limits.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill