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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.'"
I mean, how are you going to mitigate the blitzkrieg campaign IBM has launched against SPARC while you're busy with the merger details?
My work here is dung.
So, just dump more processors in a box, and optimise the processor's design to your needs.
Apple figured it out, and Oracle's not stupid. This should work until the next big jump in processor design.
RS
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Servers were Sun's highest margin stuff? No wonder they plummeted and got bought. But if Oracle doesn't find value in offering servers bundled with software, one would wonder why IBM does. It's pretty clear that servers are now second fiddle to IBM's software business.
Is it just me or was he explicit about maintaining Sparc, but said nothing about x86 servers? I'll have to find the rest of the interview on Reuters.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
For as long as I can remember, Apple has been designing and outsourcing their own chips. Be it in the form of custom ROMs or VLSIs wich Apple is a big user of.
Sort of a weird line coming from my boss whose also on Apple's board of directors.
What I think he meant was to emphasize that while Apple uses Intel and makes it's software (like Oracle), they also design their own chips (more so where the AIM alliance's desktop grade PPC was viable).
Sun makes (made) awesome technology. They built things no one else could build. They also built things no one wanted. In fact, they had a really hard time figuring out what people wanted, this was their weakness.
Oracle, on the other hand, is extremely good and marketing. They are especially good at marketing to business. They are also good at knowing what businesses want (or alternately, making business people want what they have). I don't like Oracle, but I have to say this may be the best thing that's happened for Sparc in a long time.
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I have a funny remark regarding what Ballmer is doing but my post would be tagged as flamebait, so I'll just write the clencher: Toilet paper.
It's not routers -- it's specialty appliances.
Take for instance your GPU -- it's just a processor that's tuned to do one specific task. Now, imagine that Oracle could take Sun's experience to customize a chip for the type of instructions that their database used a lot. Sure, the chip might not compete on all tasks, but if they could give a simple drop-in oracle appliance (or even a mysql appliance, and make money by selling hardware and support for it), they might have a reason to stay in the hardware business.
Now, I don't think that they should actually make the chips -- just design them for the right balance of power consumption / integer performance / floating point / cache / whatever makes sense for their applications.
Oh -- and to answer your question -- Sun is Oracle's recommended software platform. And Sun bought the Cray assets from SGI -- the E10k and other 5 digit models are descendants of that line. SPARC are highly reliable, high performance processors (or at least, they were back when I used to work on Suns ... from 1995-2003) -- but it's like RAID -- if you can throw 10 cheaper processors at it, do we really need the one big one? And that all depends on what you're trying to run on it.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Can you amplify on this? I tried an intel-based netbook recently and was pretty dismayed at the performance. I have an ARM-based music server running Linux, and although it's fine for the purpose I'm using it for, it feels agonizingly slow when I ssh in and do things on the command line -- I shudder to imagine what it would be like running Gnome and OOo or Firefox on that CPU. It seems unlikely to me that anyone could make an ARM-based netbook with acceptable performance any time in the near future, unless they were using software much more lightweight than Gnome, OOo, and Firefox. And yet I hear people talking as though ARM-based netbooks will be on the market within a year or something. What am I missing here? Is it all vaporware? Are clock speeds of ARM chips improving at some fantastic rate? It's one thing to run software like iPhone apps that are designed from scratch for a low-end CPU, but I just don't see how it's going to happen with a more traditional desktop software stack.
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No, but arguably starting with Mac or Lisa. It's pushing the metaphor I'll admit in the sense that you wouldn't wear a Macintosh the way you'd wear an iPod. But the appeal of the Mac and the Lisa was as much or more fashion and style as it was practical.
Doesn't that sound like they did actually want to keep all the Sun's hardware business including SPARC from the very beginning?
"Oh you want support for a database product on commodity hardware? Well we have this little MySQL thing you can use.
Oh you want to continue to run Oracle? Well that is now only supported on our new line of SPARC hardware."
Oracle can now (and will) sell you the entire database from sand to sql results at whatever price they deem acceptable to themselves this quarter. You thought license costs were crazy before? Well now they come with official hardware and support contracts for the box.
--- I do not moderate.
I mean, how are you going to mitigate the blitzkrieg campaign IBM has launched against SPARC while you're busy with the merger details?
Interesting choice of the word blitzkrieg to characterize the marketing campaign. I think it's very appropriate.
Blitzkrieg was a tactic to concentrate a large fast assault on the weakest part of the enemy, disregarding the flanks and trying to avoid the strong points.
It had success early on for the Germans, it was not something that could easily be maintained and after a year or so the allies were able to adapt to counter those types of attacks.
Lets not forget who won the war.
IBM is trying to take advantage of the uncertainty some people have with the merger to grab some of Sun's hardware business.
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Could dedicated database hardware outperform generic x86/sparc in the same way that GPUs are several orders of magnitude faster than software rendering? I would presume that databases are too large and varied compared to the "run a single task 2 million times in parallel" of graphics, but I am not a database coder...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Apple is a software company which happens to design hardware that they believe will run their software perfectly. It is hard to explain but, if you look at pre touch iPods, they are significantly weaker than other offerings in hardware specs. What makes people buy them is the software they run. Same thing can be said for iPhone vs. Nokia 5800. They didn't change overnight, it is same deal since first Apple 1. That is why people dreaming about official OS X on generic PC are kinda... Dreaming.
If Oracle has this neat idea of having devices, gigantic mainframe like servers (Sun's top line), portable enterprise database servers.. They are going with Apple's idea. Of course, they aren't stupid to abandon their "runs on Linux/AIX/zOS/Windows/Whatever" software.
Just imagine a Sparc which have accelerator functions just for database operations. That kind of possibilities kept Apple in PowerPC for years, G4/G5 especially have some excellent functions for media which came from Apple. Of course, times has changed and IBM started to hate end user desktop except consoles so they sold them out and moved to Intel. If you look at how easy was for Apple to move to Intel and how easy for them to release software for Windows when they want, you can't call them just a hardware company.
If something really bad happened to Apple, it is even possible to release OS X/iTools/iWork for Windows. Of course, we wouldn't get the same experience on millions of different configurations and substandard $10 cards. That is why you see Apple hardware.
I think many misses the fact that Sun makes some great blades running Windows enterprise... Or the entire "enterprise" market which POWER is the king, Intel, Sparc are fighting each other, AIX is a huge player, Cell started to have huge popularity as HPC newcomer etc. It is something like different universe.
Of course, I won't see a Sun workstation in my usual life, I won't sit and admin a Enterprise server but that doesn't make me treat Sparc as something so sucky that can be easily abandoned by an enterprise software company...
Come on people... Lets go to some enterprise focused sites (Register has a great section) to see the real deal before talking eh? A database company who hasn't produced any kind of "small" (sub 10 users) serving software pays billions just to kill mysql which doesn't compete in any of their segments, closes down Java, kills Sparc... If they are _that_ stupid, how come they are one of the largest software companies on Earth?
Germany was a small country fighting the whole world. They lost not so much because blitzkrieg wasn't a valid tactic but because it is hard to win a battle when you fight a million soldiers and the enemy has a million in reserve.
But in this case, it is IBM who is the giant. So if you want to compare things, this is the D-day landings by the free-world/IBM vs the much beleagured Nazi's/Sun who is fighting to many battles on to many fronts and who just can't keep up with the tech race.
Analogies, you really shouldn't stretch them to far or they turn against you.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Size can't have been the thing, the first ipods were bigger than their competitors. As for the interface, well, maybe there are people who really do find that stupid wheel-thing easier to use, but there are dozens of players doing that now. So why is the ipod the one that sells? Fashion, plain and simple.
You were happy with cell phones before the iPhone came out. Most people hated their cell phones and used them only for the most basic things.
Oh, come on. Compare doing any task you can think of on a near-contemporary, say the Razr. It's barely any different, and certainly not any harder. Nope, I'm not buying it. Fashion.
I am trolling
Size can't have been the thing, the first ipods were bigger than their competitors.
Bigger than the low storage flash based players (flash was a lot more expensive then, a player with gigabytes of flash would have been unthinkable). But a bit smaller and a lot sleeker than things like the DAP jukebox. The UI was also pretty well designed afaict (if you are going to have a jukebox style mp3 player the interface is pretty critical).
Making a good product is all about getting things right accross the board. If your product is crap in one important area your product is crap regardless of how good it is in other areas.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
This is not so much for the Sun employees or the JAVA stockholders, this is for the Oracle DB shops that run on solaris/sparc aka the guys paying big money to Oracle now. Oracle does not want to alienate them and get them to go IBM (and then possibly DB2) or Red Hat (and the possibly Postgress/MySQL). Also now Oracle will be making revenue on those solaris/sparc shops not just for the DB. They want to at least make outward indication that they do not intend to cause trouble for them.
Oh really? Does this happen a lot? Then maybe you'd like to explain how Oracle made $5billion profit last year (and $4billion the year before)?
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