"Wish they weren't so secretive sometimes though."
That "sometimes" was carefully put in ^-^ On Sun's site I once came across a policy document explaining that they don't think pre-announcing things too much is a good idea. (of course, they don't always do this, particularly with completely new products, though this is more understandable - particularly when you want 3rd party developers to get on board).
I value this, but on the other hand, it still does get annoying sometimes ^-^
At their 4th quarter 1999 results annoucement, they were asked when US-3 systems were going to become available. They said that the final US-3 design had been finished - ie it was completely tested and ready for production. They also quite clearly said that they won't give release dates (even vague ones) partly so that competitors won't get a chance to start laying on the FUD beforehand...
Maybe I should have said "custom edge triggered flip-flop". I know it's a basic component, but there's lots of ways of physically making them. Doing this sort of thing is fairly common though... I think I was being too brief in the article.
If you're interested, here's the relevant paragraph from the IEEE Micro paper:
With clock rates continuing to increase, the part of the cycle time allocated to flip-flops comes under great pressue. To improve this, we designed a new edge-triggered flip-flop. This partially static output, dynamic input flip-flop does not require setup time and is one of the lowest D-to-Q delays for the power and area in use today. The flip-flop design's dynamic input stage effectively allows up to tuck in a full logic stage without increasing the D-to-Q delay. The noise immunity increases by an input shutoff mechanism that reduces the effective sample time, allowing the design to be used as though it were fully static.
Later in the year, Sun's replacement for the Starfire, code named Serengetti will be launched. This will have
up to 128 CPUs in one box, and you can cluster them (so that they appear to be 1 machine) using a special fiber interconnect, for up to 1024 CPUs, probably using a COMA memory structure (similar to ccNUMA), something Sun have been working on for many years.
Later on in my article it suggests that they'll be moving to 0.18 much quicker than indicated by the IEEE paper. It seems to me currently, that they'll start at 0.18 micron instead of 0.25 (partly because, it's late, so easier to start at 0.18). This'll help reduce power consumption.
Sun's high-end kit doesn't take a standard mains socket either ^-^ But no prob - most places you're likely to install them will have the required power supplies. The Starfire can have up to 5 redundant power line cords, each of which has to be able to handle 24 amps...
The reason why the power consumption is so high is that there's so many pins on the packaging, there's so many high-bandwidth data pipes etc. Ie it's both because they're using slightly out of date fabs from TI, and because of the design. The UltraSPARC-IIs consume much much less power - they're a lot smaller and were originally designed for a 0.45 micron process, I think it was.
Things might be reasonably easy for up to 128 CPUs - the most you'll see (for a bit) in a single box. This wouldn't require a huge effort to get working under Linux, I think because it would mostly be evolutionary from the software point of view. However, I don't know if Linux will work on Suns' 64 CPU Starfire at the moment. (I heard of NetBSD running on a Starfire at NASA about 2 years ago, but I don't remember hearing about Linux...)
To get to 1024 CPUs as one system, you'd use clustering, using special interconnects, which would also require a fair amount of custom software. Some of this would be a bit like Beowulf, but not quite.
Still, as general members of the public, you'll be able to get the source code to Solaris 8 in about 2-3 months, and this will include their clustering software. So, you'll be able to see how Sun do it at least.
Besides, given that Linux (currently) doesn't scale that well (certainly well behind Solaris), there isn't a great deal of point, from a technical perspective, about doing a "port".
I've no idea about the legal side of doing clean room versions either. The license for the Solaris source code isn't available yet.
Just thought I'd let you all know that I used emacs to write the whole article in HTML. (though the webmaster for Ace's Hardware did some final formatting to fit with the rest of the site). Written on a FreeBSD box too...
I've already started writing a 2nd article, this time on Sun's MAJC chips, which have lots of interesting features. Yummy. The reason why I'm doing a bit about Sun hardware is because (a) I tend to follow what they're up to because they do occationally do pretty interesting stuff, and (b) nobody else has written much...
Wish they weren't so secretive sometimes though. If you actually look at Sun's site, there's almost nothing about the US-3 technically. Still have to wait until Sun start actually selling US-3 hardware before can be certain of anything...
What, coloured tables not good enough for you? (just kidding)
When the first US-3 samples came out, there was a pic with Scott McNealy holding a US-3 in his hand, but it was never posted on Sun's site and the original copy of it has long since gone. Since the part isn't actually shipping to customers yet, there are no "official" pictures yet.
I did think about doing some graphics for the article, but couldn't think of something that would really help...
You may be interested to find that the final release does not (currently) include a JIT JVM, because they were using Inprise's and that's not yet certified. You can download it seperately though.
There was a JavaLive chat yesterday about the Java on Linux stuff. They haven't put up the transcripts yet though.
For Java 1.3 from Sun, the Windows version will come out first, then Solaris then Linux. However, they do want to syncronise all releases together and should do this at or before Java 1.4 - might happen first for a maintenance release.
I managed to see most of the broadcast, but missed about the first hour's worth. Anyway, it has some interesting similarities with Sun's MAJC architecture design:
Been in development for some time, but secretly. (Didn't hear a word from Sun until it was practically complete)
Has the idea of trying to remove backwards compatability hardware problems and issues. (Crusoe with code morphing, MAJC with Java). This makes it much easier to really optimise for each generation.
VLIW type design. Sounds like Crusoe is fixed 128bit - like most designs. MAJC is variable - 32-128.
low power embedded markets. However Sun is more "embedded" than low power (MAJC 5200 is 15W @ 500MHz), but Sun are going for some pretty damn serious performance - eats mutliple MPEG2 streams for breakfast, 100 voice of IP channels at once, or 50-90M triangles/sec for 3D lighting/transform etc - the PlayStation 2 "Emotion Engine" is a similar product (in terms of performance, power, cost) but is rather more conventional.
Both using IBM fab. Both 0.22 initially, and 0.18 later. (Sun are using copper interconnects, I guess Crusoe is too)
The point about doing benchmarks for the Crusoe discussed in the annoucement is quite apt too - with Java HotSpot, the longer you run it for, the faster it gets. Normally, you use a real application for minutes or hours, but most current benchmarks don't run that long, so isn't quite so "fair".
However, Crusoe beat MAJC to being fabbed and sampled. (MAJC should have "taped out" by now, though no official annoucement yet)
Different markets (MAJC doesn't execute x86 for one, but maybe they could add it later...), though there is some overlap - I think both are going to be very interesting to watch. Both bring some interesting new ideas and applications of things.
Some architectural differences: Crusoe could do just about any instruction set "directly" through code morphing - you'd just have to code it. However, don't expect them to do many as it would be a huge amount of work for each instruction set. They can also do more than one at a time. Though MAJC is not a Java bytecode executor (and you could port Linux to it as easily as a typical RISC CPU) it only does it's instruction set. They hope to use Java to make things more "portable", which is a lot harder than the code morphing techinique which is basically transparant. Not much details has been given about the Crusoe engine, so it's hard to compare, but it doesn't yet seem like it has hardware/vertical threading support, or chip level multiprocessing support (more than one CPU core on one chip), for example.
MAJC does have this one thing which similar in terms of complexity and mixing hardware/software though. When running a JVM, you can use a mode called STM (Space Time Computing) which uses more than one CPU to speed up a single threaded Java app (using some interesting thread speculation techniques), which like the Crusoe code morphing engine, is transpart - you don't need to compi
The source code to Solaris isn't publically available (though it's not too hard to get hold of) yet, though Sun have publically commited to making the source available. Don't expect the complete source available from the start, and it won't be Open Source TM either. I currently expect this to start about the same time Solaris 8 comes out - in a few months.
Sun have a page & FAQ about this change. It is basically just marketing. I think their statement about how that the '2.' part is basically redundant because they have no changes planned that would justify a '3.' release, is pretty fair. So, instead of Solaris 2.5,2.6,2.7,2.8, they did "Solaris 7", the next is "Solaris 8", to be followed by "Solaris 9".
btw, unlike what some people do, the name only shows up in marketing/documentation/logos. With 'uname', the OS reports itself as being SunOS 5.7! (Solaris 2.X is SunOS 5.X) Backwards compatible with 2 levels of marketing re-branding ^-^
I don't particularly care what Microsoft do... btw, The Register has an amusing article on "Microsoft Year 2000".
You may be interested to know that they (Sun) are working to make StarOffice's file format use XML. It doesn't have 100% "Word" file support (because Microsoft doesn't give out enough info - hint hint to DoJ) but they're working on it...
See Sun press release. For Toy Story 2, they used 120 E4500 with 14 UltraSparc-II's each - total of 1680 CPUs, along with 4.5terabytes of storage. List price of around $30M I guess, though I presume they got some kind of discount ^-^. btw, one of the requirements was for the render-farm to be pretty compact. Performance Computing magazine have a review of the E4500 here. Pixar used Sun kit for their previous stuff too. If they do a Toy Story 3, by then the UltraSparc-IV should be out, which'll be about 5x faster in FP than current top-end UltraSparc-II's.
If you compare the current/old status by maker, with the latest status, you'll see that SGI/Cray have dropped from 182 machines to 133, IBM have increased from 118 to 141, and Sun have gone from 95 to 113 - all those Starfires come in handy, as there's 40 Starfires in the list with 64 400Mhz UltraSparc-II's - current max capacity for 1 Starfire. However, the first Sun entry is at #33, though Sun's UltraSparc-III and next-gen Serengetti server will help, when they eventually come out...
FISCAL 2000, not calender 2000 I've seen the same mistake made in several places...
The SEC filing specifically states that the delay will be until 2nd half of Sun's fiscal 2000 year. However, Sun's fiscal 2000 year is 1st July 1999 to 30th June 2000. In other words, this means the final product will be out and shipping in volume by the 1st half of calender 2000. The beta will be coming out by the end of this year.
Still, it does mean StarPortal will be 3-6 months later than previously stated...
on a happier note, Sun have had over 1,000,000 StarOffice 5.1 downloads in the last 2 months. See Press release. They have a download counter on their homepage, or go here for a direct link to the image. They also have a download counter for Java 2 SDK, and Solaris - though in the latter case, this is the number of "Free Solaris" orders... not downloads...
I just re-checked. The figures for the % speedup for the SPECjvm98 benchmark is between 51% and 67% depending on the each of the sub-benchmarks in the SPECjvm suites. Here's the actual values for each of the sub-benchmarks: compress: +51% jess: +56% db: +62% javac: +67% jack: +64% mpegaudio: +55%
The first MAJC chip, the 5200, has a 32-bit 400Mhz embedded Rambus 'bus' for main memory - though it's actually a point-to-point link. If you read the details you'll find that (like with most new high end stuff) the MAJC uses a cross-bar switch instead of a bus, which is much faster and more scalable, but more expensive. It also has a 66Mhz (64bit?) PCI connector, has 2 250Mhz UPA connectors (UPA is Sun's equivilant of PCI). You can also line up a load of 5200s in a row, connecting one of the output ports to the next's import port, so you can pipeline a complex algorithm (eg graphics) across multiple chips.
Some comments... Firstly, I don't think it was made clear that the MAJC architecture can execute compiled C/C++ as easily as Java. You'd also probably be using a dynamic compiler like HotSpot rather than a JIT compiler. I think the guy got it wrong about the functional units being data agnostic - the registers definately are though. Still, you can (pretty much) execute 4 of any type of instruction at once - the first block is slightly different compared to 2-4 (which are indentical), though I don't know how. The very interesting STC concept is much easier to do with the Java programming model (because of certain issues with data) compared to C/C++. They don't say how easy it would be to apply STC to C/C++ though - might be impossible in the general case, though possible in some "limited" cases. The MAJC does also have scoreboarding for instructions for dynamic execution times eg loads, though I'm not sure if this applies to things like FP multi/div/sqrt etc. There's a couple of other interesting things the guy missed - the cross-bar data switch and the steaming data ports, for example. Though apart from that, I think it was a pretty decent review.
With regards to the first chip - the MAJC 5200, it's supposed to "tape out" (get first physical implimentation) by the end of the year and sample in Q2 next year. The 5200 has 2 CPU units on chip (with a shared L1 data-cache and a seperate L1 instruction caches), will be made on a.22 micron process, run at 500Mhz and consume 15W.
Here are some "here's how fast it is" stuff from the PR:
This chip is expected to be able to handle over one hundred voice-over-IP channels while enabling encryption and decompression of the packets over a 10 gigabit-per-second Ethernet connection. This means that a very large number of simultaneous phone conversations could be supported in a small-footprint gateway server device. In the area of image processing, the JPEG 2000 test set is anticipated to run at 78 MB/s while encoding 8-bit sample images. For networked video, two streams of MPEG-2 data representing five Mbps interlaced sequences have the ability to be simultaneously decoded, with additional processor capacity still available. For teleconferencing under the H.263 standard, six decodes and one encode are expected to be handled in real time. In advanced audio applications, an AC-3 decode of 5.1 channels at 384 kps is predicted to use only seven and one-half percent of the capacity of one of the 5200's two processors.
btw, Sun have a 2000 processor array for simulating their UltraSparc-III chip and they do do some pretty accurate simulations, including things like booting Solaris. In the MAJC 5200 PDF/PS file, they also quote some (estimated) speed-ups gained from using the STC technique for the SPECjvm98 suite of programs - they get from 40-60% or so, which I think is very impressive. The MAJC 5200 also has a graphics pre-processor (it's going to be used in Sun's new high-end graphics systems) and they quote some triangle processing figures with different levels of lighting detail. I don't really get what they mean, but they quote from 60 million triangles/s to 90M/s or so, which is in about the same region as the PlayStation2, or about 4x faster than the fastest current mainstream PC graphics card. However, that doesn't mean you can use 60m-90m in real world stuff...
In general, the chip is aimed at "low end" (though for Sun, "low end" equates to less than $100,000 generally) embedded solutions.
At Reuters Business News, there is this report: Silicon Valley Cheers Microsoft Ruling, I liked the quote from a Sun lawyer "The aura that surrounded Microsoft as this all powerful, inexorable force that always won has now been significantly diminished,"
Microsoft should be prohibited from buying the distribution channels of the future (e.g. cable and wireless) and from buying rather than inventing technologies. Microsoft's unfettered use of a cash hoard created out of monopoly profits is a competition killer;
The government needs to foster competition in the software industry by assuring that the technical interfaces of Microsoft's monopoly products are open;
Microsoft must be forbidden from entering into exclusive or preclusive agreements;
Microsoft must be required to make their pricing policies non- discriminatory and public.
I've read most of the "Findings of Fact" - skimmed some bits. Not bad reading actually. I'd followed the trial pretty closely (mostly by reading stuff at The Register who did include a lot of detail and analysis) and I can see where pretty much all the points Judge Jackson brought up. I agree pretty much right on with just about everything the good Judge said. I'm no lawyer though... but my studies in Economics helped!
I remember an article that appeared on Infoworld about a year ago, basically saying that if MS is offically declared a monopoly, it'll basically open the sluice gates for law-suits against MS.
It'll probabaly have a decent effect on the two other major current MS lawsuits - Sun against MS over Java (that Judge for that lawsuit is expected to re-rule on some major points soon) and the Caldera one which will go to trial soon. (couldn't find any references to Caldera in the "findings of fact" though)
Another interesting point is that it is (apparantly) possible for the DoJ to ask for any full appeal to go directly the the Supreme Court! (or something like that) Uh oh... ^-^
Finally... I wish the people I do share dealings with would do "future" shares - basically betting that the share price will fall, as I had some money I'd quite happily put on MS's shares falling. Oh well... It'll be interesting to see the affect on MS's main competitors.
Slashdot Mirror
Their take is basically that Intel can't handle how to deal with competition, and is kinda panicing.
The Register is also suggesting that AMD might start fabbing Alpha's.
How about some 1GHz Athlons instead. They'll be available in full volume production too... unlike the P3. Cheaper too.
That "sometimes" was carefully put in ^-^ On Sun's site I once came across a policy document explaining that they don't think pre-announcing things too much is a good idea. (of course, they don't always do this, particularly with completely new products, though this is more understandable - particularly when you want 3rd party developers to get on board).
I value this, but on the other hand, it still does get annoying sometimes ^-^
At their 4th quarter 1999 results annoucement, they were asked when US-3 systems were going to become available. They said that the final US-3 design had been finished - ie it was completely tested and ready for production. They also quite clearly said that they won't give release dates (even vague ones) partly so that competitors won't get a chance to start laying on the FUD beforehand...
If you're interested, here's the relevant paragraph from the IEEE Micro paper:
Sun's high-end kit doesn't take a standard mains socket either ^-^ But no prob - most places you're likely to install them will have the required power supplies. The Starfire can have up to 5 redundant power line cords, each of which has to be able to handle 24 amps...
The reason why the power consumption is so high is that there's so many pins on the packaging, there's so many high-bandwidth data pipes etc. Ie it's both because they're using slightly out of date fabs from TI, and because of the design. The UltraSPARC-IIs consume much much less power - they're a lot smaller and were originally designed for a 0.45 micron process, I think it was.
To get to 1024 CPUs as one system, you'd use clustering, using special interconnects, which would also require a fair amount of custom software. Some of this would be a bit like Beowulf, but not quite.
Still, as general members of the public, you'll be able to get the source code to Solaris 8 in about 2-3 months, and this will include their clustering software. So, you'll be able to see how Sun do it at least.
Besides, given that Linux (currently) doesn't scale that well (certainly well behind Solaris), there isn't a great deal of point, from a technical perspective, about doing a "port".
I've no idea about the legal side of doing clean room versions either. The license for the Solaris source code isn't available yet.
I've already started writing a 2nd article, this time on Sun's MAJC chips, which have lots of interesting features. Yummy. The reason why I'm doing a bit about Sun hardware is because (a) I tend to follow what they're up to because they do occationally do pretty interesting stuff, and (b) nobody else has written much...
Wish they weren't so secretive sometimes though. If you actually look at Sun's site, there's almost nothing about the US-3 technically. Still have to wait until Sun start actually selling US-3 hardware before can be certain of anything...
When the first US-3 samples came out, there was a pic with Scott McNealy holding a US-3 in his hand, but it was never posted on Sun's site and the original copy of it has long since gone. Since the part isn't actually shipping to customers yet, there are no "official" pictures yet.
I did think about doing some graphics for the article, but couldn't think of something that would really help...
There was a JavaLive chat yesterday about the Java on Linux stuff. They haven't put up the transcripts yet though.
For Java 1.3 from Sun, the Windows version will come out first, then Solaris then Linux. However, they do want to syncronise all releases together and should do this at or before Java 1.4 - might happen first for a maintenance release.
Been in development for some time, but secretly. (Didn't hear a word from Sun until it was practically complete)
Has the idea of trying to remove backwards compatability hardware problems and issues. (Crusoe with code morphing, MAJC with Java). This makes it much easier to really optimise for each generation.
VLIW type design. Sounds like Crusoe is fixed 128bit - like most designs. MAJC is variable - 32-128.
low power embedded markets. However Sun is more "embedded" than low power (MAJC 5200 is 15W @ 500MHz), but Sun are going for some pretty damn serious performance - eats mutliple MPEG2 streams for breakfast, 100 voice of IP channels at once, or 50-90M triangles/sec for 3D lighting/transform etc - the PlayStation 2 "Emotion Engine" is a similar product (in terms of performance, power, cost) but is rather more conventional.
Both using IBM fab. Both 0.22 initially, and 0.18 later. (Sun are using copper interconnects, I guess Crusoe is too)
The point about doing benchmarks for the Crusoe discussed in the annoucement is quite apt too - with Java HotSpot, the longer you run it for, the faster it gets. Normally, you use a real application for minutes or hours, but most current benchmarks don't run that long, so isn't quite so "fair".
However, Crusoe beat MAJC to being fabbed and sampled. (MAJC should have "taped out" by now, though no official annoucement yet)
Different markets (MAJC doesn't execute x86 for one, but maybe they could add it later...), though there is some overlap - I think both are going to be very interesting to watch. Both bring some interesting new ideas and applications of things.
Some architectural differences: Crusoe could do just about any instruction set "directly" through code morphing - you'd just have to code it. However, don't expect them to do many as it would be a huge amount of work for each instruction set. They can also do more than one at a time. Though MAJC is not a Java bytecode executor (and you could port Linux to it as easily as a typical RISC CPU) it only does it's instruction set. They hope to use Java to make things more "portable", which is a lot harder than the code morphing techinique which is basically transparant. Not much details has been given about the Crusoe engine, so it's hard to compare, but it doesn't yet seem like it has hardware/vertical threading support, or chip level multiprocessing support (more than one CPU core on one chip), for example.
MAJC does have this one thing which similar in terms of complexity and mixing hardware/software though. When running a JVM, you can use a mode called STM (Space Time Computing) which uses more than one CPU to speed up a single threaded Java app (using some interesting thread speculation techniques), which like the Crusoe code morphing engine, is transpart - you don't need to compi
Bit like "close, but no cigar"
btw, unlike what some people do, the name only shows up in marketing/documentation/logos. With 'uname', the OS reports itself as being SunOS 5.7! (Solaris 2.X is SunOS 5.X) Backwards compatible with 2 levels of marketing re-branding ^-^
I don't particularly care what Microsoft do... btw, The Register has an amusing article on "Microsoft Year 2000".
StarPortal will have a Java client, but that software's not even in beta yet...
You may be interested to know that they (Sun) are working to make StarOffice's file format use XML. It doesn't have 100% "Word" file support (because Microsoft doesn't give out enough info - hint hint to DoJ) but they're working on it...
See Sun press release. For Toy Story 2, they used 120 E4500 with 14 UltraSparc-II's each - total of 1680 CPUs, along with 4.5terabytes of storage. List price of around $30M I guess, though I presume they got some kind of discount ^-^. btw, one of the requirements was for the render-farm to be pretty compact. Performance Computing magazine have a review of the E4500 here. Pixar used Sun kit for their previous stuff too. If they do a Toy Story 3, by then the UltraSparc-IV should be out, which'll be about 5x faster in FP than current top-end UltraSparc-II's.
The SEC filing specifically states that the delay will be until 2nd half of Sun's fiscal 2000 year. However, Sun's fiscal 2000 year is 1st July 1999 to 30th June 2000. In other words, this means the final product will be out and shipping in volume by the 1st half of calender 2000. The beta will be coming out by the end of this year.
Still, it does mean StarPortal will be 3-6 months later than previously stated...
on a happier note, Sun have had over 1,000,000 StarOffice 5.1 downloads in the last 2 months. See Press release. They have a download counter on their homepage, or go here for a direct link to the image. They also have a download counter for Java 2 SDK, and Solaris - though in the latter case, this is the number of "Free Solaris" orders... not downloads...
compress: +51%
jess: +56%
db: +62%
javac: +67%
jack: +64%
mpegaudio: +55%
Personally, I think that's very impressive.
The first MAJC chip, the 5200, has a 32-bit 400Mhz embedded Rambus 'bus' for main memory - though it's actually a point-to-point link. If you read the details you'll find that (like with most new high end stuff) the MAJC uses a cross-bar switch instead of a bus, which is much faster and more scalable, but more expensive. It also has a 66Mhz (64bit?) PCI connector, has 2 250Mhz UPA connectors (UPA is Sun's equivilant of PCI). You can also line up a load of 5200s in a row, connecting one of the output ports to the next's import port, so you can pipeline a complex algorithm (eg graphics) across multiple chips.
MAJC developers connection
A chat with the lead designer for the MAJC architecture
MAJC 5200 chip press release From MAJC docs page: First MAJC implimentation presentation.
Some comments... Firstly, I don't think it was made clear that the MAJC architecture can execute compiled C/C++ as easily as Java. You'd also probably be using a dynamic compiler like HotSpot rather than a JIT compiler. I think the guy got it wrong about the functional units being data agnostic - the registers definately are though. Still, you can (pretty much) execute 4 of any type of instruction at once - the first block is slightly different compared to 2-4 (which are indentical), though I don't know how. The very interesting STC concept is much easier to do with the Java programming model (because of certain issues with data) compared to C/C++. They don't say how easy it would be to apply STC to C/C++ though - might be impossible in the general case, though possible in some "limited" cases. The MAJC does also have scoreboarding for instructions for dynamic execution times eg loads, though I'm not sure if this applies to things like FP multi/div/sqrt etc. There's a couple of other interesting things the guy missed - the cross-bar data switch and the steaming data ports, for example. Though apart from that, I think it was a pretty decent review.
With regards to the first chip - the MAJC 5200, it's supposed to "tape out" (get first physical implimentation) by the end of the year and sample in Q2 next year. The 5200 has 2 CPU units on chip (with a shared L1 data-cache and a seperate L1 instruction caches), will be made on a .22 micron process, run at 500Mhz and consume 15W.
Here are some "here's how fast it is" stuff from the PR:
btw, Sun have a 2000 processor array for simulating their UltraSparc-III chip and they do do some pretty accurate simulations, including things like booting Solaris. In the MAJC 5200 PDF/PS file, they also quote some (estimated) speed-ups gained from using the STC technique for the SPECjvm98 suite of programs - they get from 40-60% or so, which I think is very impressive. The MAJC 5200 also has a graphics pre-processor (it's going to be used in Sun's new high-end graphics systems) and they quote some triangle processing figures with different levels of lighting detail. I don't really get what they mean, but they quote from 60 million triangles/s to 90M/s or so, which is in about the same region as the PlayStation2, or about 4x faster than the fastest current mainstream PC graphics card. However, that doesn't mean you can use 60m-90m in real world stuff...
In general, the chip is aimed at "low end" (though for Sun, "low end" equates to less than $100,000 generally) embedded solutions.
At The Register, there is an interesting article: Judge: Linux can't break Windows monopoly. See also, What will happen if Microsoft finally loses?, Judge's ruling opens way for Caldera Win95 suit, Caldera judge finds MS 'grossly misprepresented' facts.
At Reuters Business News, there is this report: Silicon Valley Cheers Microsoft Ruling, I liked the quote from a Sun lawyer "The aura that surrounded Microsoft as this all powerful, inexorable force that always won has now been significantly diminished,"
On Sun's website, on Friday, they put up this page: Sun Responds to Department of Justice vs Microsoft Case, where they give their own ideas about what to do to MS:
Jackson ruling sends powerful message
I remember an article that appeared on Infoworld about a year ago, basically saying that if MS is offically declared a monopoly, it'll basically open the sluice gates for law-suits against MS.
It'll probabaly have a decent effect on the two other major current MS lawsuits - Sun against MS over Java (that Judge for that lawsuit is expected to re-rule on some major points soon) and the Caldera one which will go to trial soon. (couldn't find any references to Caldera in the "findings of fact" though)
Another interesting point is that it is (apparantly) possible for the DoJ to ask for any full appeal to go directly the the Supreme Court! (or something like that) Uh oh... ^-^
Finally... I wish the people I do share dealings with would do "future" shares - basically betting that the share price will fall, as I had some money I'd quite happily put on MS's shares falling. Oh well... It'll be interesting to see the affect on MS's main competitors.