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Oracle Releases SPARC T5 Servers; Too Late?
First time accepted submitter bobthesungeek76036 writes "On March 26th, Larry Ellison and always with fashionable haircut John Fowler announced the new line of SPARC servers from Oracle. Touted as the fastest microprocessor in the world, they put up some impressive SPEC numbers against much more expensive (and older) IBM hardware. Is the industry still interested in SPARC or is it too late for Larry to regain the server market that Sun Microsystems had many moons ago?"
El Reg has a pretty good overview of the new hardware; the T5 certainly looks interesting for highly threaded work loads (there's some massive SMT going on with 16 threads per core), but with Intel dominating for single-threaded performance and ARM-based servers becoming available squeezing them for massive multi-threading, is there really any hope in Oracle's efforts to stay in the hardware game?
Unfortunately, even in (sizable) niches like telecom, the days of exclusively SPARC shops are long over.
And there's the rub. What's Solaris got that nobody else has got? dtrace, zones, supported zfs. All of those things are coming to other operating systems. Even if they weren't, nobody is sitting at a Sun machine any more (statistically) so the homogeneity argument has also been lost. If Sun had ever taken Solaris-x86 seriously then that might not have wound up being the case, but they didn't, so it did.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why the fuck did you have to copy the entire thing for a 1 sentence reply?!
You're just as big of a dickshit as the OP is.