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IBM takes aim at Sun

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Monday September 13, 1999 @01:00AM from the fire-in-the-hold dept.

Sensei@bonsaipotato.com points us over to the latest move by IBM. IBM is rolling out their RS/6000 S80 and is aiming to beat Sun at all sides in the Unix universe, both with this roll-out, and their pending purchase of Sequent.

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Project Sun Screen by ChrisRijk · 1999-09-12 16:39 · Score: 4

"Project Sun Screen" is IBMs name for their plan. For commercial unix, Sun have been pretty much stealing the show for quite a while now. I think HP are the only other large company to have better than a small increase in revenue recently in commercial Unix. HP have also been targeting Sun more recently, as are others - if you are the market leader, then you get targeted the most.
I don't know how IBM are comparing their performance to Sun's Starfire. Pretty meaningless without giving any details. btw the Starfire is over 2 years old now. I don't think Sun are yet officially supporting their 450Mhz UltraSparc-II in volume on Starfire yet, even though it's been out for a while. (btw, you can get US-II 450's with 8MByte of 2nd level cache - clocked at 450Mhz!) Also, Sun's UltraSparc-III will be shipping in volume this December, starting at 600Mhz, and from early SPEC 95 benchmarks I've heard of it's about 10% faster (in fp) than an 600Mhz EV67 (Alpha 21264A) and they haven't even finished optimising it yet. SPEC int should be very good too.
Latest SPEC results here - 600Mhz Athlon has SPEC int/fp of 27.2/21.6. 667Mhz EV67 (Alpha 21264A) has SPEC int/fp of 37.5/65.5. The more competition, the better! (that includes competition between OS's) .