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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.
"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.
Well, of course he's going to say that - he's not just going to say "well, we're planning on axing 20,000 jobs and kissing bye-bye to the SPARC line". He has to at least maintain the *illusion* that they're going to keep producing SPARC chips.
I love the line about "even Apple" is designing its own chips. One could say "even Sun" sells Intel.
Cemil.
hell, even doritos make their own chips
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
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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
Ellison always finds ways to throw tiny daggers at Microsoft.
While Oracle is big, I kind of doubt that they could ever keep up with Intel. Even in turn-key appliance servers (sort of an iMac of databases, pre-configured computer), Intel/AMD will outstrip them in performance and they won't be able to stay up to date.
The only place I can think that this would be useful is routers. In a turn-key appliance like that that does a very specialized job (especially one that requires custom silicon to do the routing fast enough), SPARC could make sense. It would make it harder to steal their software (because you'd have to run on SPARC). It would give them total control (no need to source processors from external companies). They could even build the SPARC cores into the same chips that hold all the magic high-speed routing magic.
SPARC could be useful, but I doubt they'll try and compete in the general market.
This is just off the top of my head. Is there something special about SPARC that would make it remarkably good at some specific application that Oracle uses?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
Qxe4
I'll wager this character "!"
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.
WOw, I didnt know oracle was buying Sun. I wonder will this increase oracles usage on Solaris
Doesn't that sound like they did actually want to keep all the Sun's hardware business including SPARC from the very beginning?
WOw, I didnt know oracle was buying Sun.
I wonder will this increase oracles usage on Solaris
I'm going to bookmark this thread and reference whenever someone says "there's no such thing as a stupid question."
1. If you scrolled down this far, you would have seen the link to the story about Oracle buying Sun titled "Oracle buys Sun" or any of the dozen related stories on slashdot or other sites including mainstream news.
2. Solaris on SPARC is already the largest base for deployment of Oracle.
I kindly request you change your handle from t3chn0n3rd to something that doesn't imply a familiarity with the technology world.
If you have recently been in a coma I apologize for being so blunt.
"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.
Dual Opteron < $600
This is just a minor nitpick, but knowing what your customers want is part of the marketing. Marketing is not just advertising, though many seem to forget that.
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.
"But the appeal of the Mac and the Lisa was as much or more fashion and style as it was practical."
That's an interesting statement, and it betrays more about you than about the topic we're discussing. I remember back when I went to school and the schoolwork our teachers handed out suddenly changed from photocopied hand-written stuff to neatly layouted, professionally looking stuff. That was when the Mac came out and normal people were suddenly able to use computers in a meaningful way.
You're a geek. You don't care about normal people, because you were perfectly happy with DOS or whatever you were using. To you, all that stuff that made computers usable for everyone else was just "fashion".
You were as wrong then as you are now.
To you, the iPod is a fashion statement because you were happy with the MP3 players that came before the iPod. To most people, those were unusable, bulky pieces of crap. 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.
Perhaps creating things normal people can actually use seems like "fashion" to you, but most people don't use these devices for their own sake; they don't enjoy learning complex stuff just to learn complex stuff. They want to get stuff done, and all of those things that you like, all those ways you can tinker with your toys actually only get in their way.
Apple's success is not about fashion and style, it is about normal people getting stuff done.
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.
With all the talk of container and "lego" data centers, Oracle wants to become fully vertically integrated so that you can go to Oracle and say: "I've got $10 million -- sell my data center blocks".
Sun's already been developing their own data-center-in-a-shipping-container, and Oracle now has all the bits and pieces:
Also, having a horde of hardware engineers is Ellison's wet dream. As I said before, Larry Ellison wakes up every morning and asks himself, "How can I [fsck] Microsoft today?" Larry has stated in the past he wouldn't mind moving beyond databases, and with Sun's hardware and Java, he's poised to do pretty much anything he wants. So he might entertain delusions of mobile, return of the net appliances, home multimedia, etc. In the short term, though, I think he's hoping he can create custom hardware to make Oracle and Java run much faster. Will he succeed? Dunno, but Larry Ellison has a ferocious desire to succeed, and often, that's all you need.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
They also built things no one wanted. In fact, they had a really hard time figuring out what people wanted, this was their weakness.
That was supposed to be the job of their ambassadors and maybe the sales/marketing people - to get feedback from potential customers as to what they wanted to see in future products. Problem is, they mostly wanted a solid reliable OS that that they wouldn't have to wait for the first service pack before upgrading an entire department as well as having a competitive price/performance ratio.
For Sparc processors like Niagara II, the server group would want more cache and hardware support for encryption, but the workstation group would want more floating-point processors. In the end they both get what they want with multi-core chips.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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)?
Qxe4
Oracle wanted the hardware, so they could become the kind of top-to-bottom solution that IBM used to be in the Mainframe days. IBM failed to prevent it, so now they're loudly saying "sour grapes! sour grapes!"
I suspect the commentators who missed why IBM and Oracle wanted Sun were the same ones who said IBM and Sun were doomed technologies, and that the future was NT 4 on Intel x86-32.
And to answer the question literally, you put your marketers on marketing the company while you put your lawyers on working on the merger. I assume they're different people (;-))
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net