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The US market from one side, the Linux and Google from other side makes Sun to lose a lot of it's strength. The Core2 CPU from Intel makes Sparc CPU not so attractive, and AMD based solutions are lower on performance that equivalent Xeon CPUs. So most software goes on outsourcing and opensourcing as Sun and Novel does.
Swartz anyway has a lot of achievements from Sun like promoting Java, make it opensource, promoting Netbeans and make Eclipse project to attach to Netbeans foundation. Mostly, looking over the windows, you can see the sun, in freedom.

AMD still beats Intel in the PPC market segment. But thats going to disapear soon when Intel releases chips with Quickpath.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080430-ps3s-cell-cpu-tops-hi...

Sun has an excellent offering in a number of areas. For webservers, databases and file servers the T1000, and T2000 are ahead of anything else especially in terms of performance per Watt but in general any application where you need a lot of threads. With AMD they have a competitive HPC offering.

Such metrics are pretty meaningless overall. All CPU makers now, including AMD and Intel, are talking about putting more cores on a chip and doing more in terms of parallel applications and threading (corner cases for performance improvements really) when people really want to do a task twice the size in half the time and get more through - and the x86-64 processors will still always cream SPARC there. In the seven years since I seriously looked at Linux/x86 and Solaris/SPARC head-to-head, 4370 pystones/sec on an UltraSPARC versus 17,543 pystones/sec on a 1.4GHz Athlon was a pretty big no brainer, and that's why lots of academic institutions in particular jumped off. I don't see that the situation has improved.

Backing yourself into the 'performance per watt' bracket is a very tight and expensive niche:

http://www.imorphous.com/2006/08/17/evaluating-suns-sun-fire-t1000-...
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2006/08/15/sun-fire-coolthreads-t1000-...
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2006/08/15/sun-fire-coolthreads-t1000-...

Punchline:

http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2006/08/15/sun-fire-coolthreads-t1000-...

It's not even close. Some of the comments are the funniest thing about it.

Even worse, all of the benchmarks that Sun throws around for these things themselves require some fairly specific configuring of certain software on Solaris, and recompiling in Forte or Sun Compiler Studio (whatever it's called now) as Sun reps have been telling you for years whenever a gcc query has popped up. Quite frankly, a lot of people decided that it all wasn't worth the hassle years ago.

I don't know why Sun continues to sell SPARC in this market segment, and they've been getting burnt for some time now. It gets eaten by any x86-64 machine in terms of performance, which Sun sell anyway, it doesn't rake in any real energy savings versus the competition and it's significantly more expensive.

Edited 2008-05-04 15:17 UTC

In my experience Sun gear beats x86 on I/O across the backplane, not on raw processing power anymore. Also Sun's C compiler was (still is?) a factor of two faster than gcc on the same hardware (e450 with four Sparc), due to the very highly optimised math libraries Sun had made. For scientific work the Sun gear was extremely performant (although still far too expensive). Sun gear was also great as it failed very rarely compared to generic x86 stuff - which means something if you need reliability and don't have the room to do a Google (deploy large numbers of x86 boxen).

Your ignorance is astounding.

Lets just look at raw performance here, both systems in the following configuration cost almost the same:

HP ProLiant DL580 G5
Intel Xeon X7350 Processor 2933MHz
16 cores, 4 chips, 4 cores/chip
SPECweb2005 = 40046
SPECweb2005_Banking = 71104
SPECweb2005_Ecommerce = 55552
SPECweb2005_Support = 36032

http://www.spec.org/web2005/results/res2007q4/web2005-20071203-0010...

Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220
Sun UltraSPARC T2 1400Mhz
8 cores, 1 chip, 8 cores/chip (8 threads/core)
SPECweb2005 = 41847
SPECweb2005_Banking = 70000
SPECweb2005_Ecommerce = 58000
SPECweb2005_Support = 40000

http://www.spec.org/web2005/results/res2008q2/web2005-20080408-0010...

Oh look! a single 8 core 1.4 GHz SPARC system is better than a 16 core 2.9 GHz Xeon System in raw performance.

In performance per watt the Xeon box will look like a joke. Each of the Xeons in that box take 130 Ws so 4x130 is 520 Watts for the cpus alone. The UltraSPARC on the other hand consumes 95 watts normal max 123 Watts.

Why does an Intel based system need 5x the power and 4x the cpus to produce worse results than a single UltraSPARC chip?

Doesn't look like your ignorant statement " the x86-64 processors will still always cream SPARC there."

BTW Academic institutions are back. http://hpcvl.org/hardware/victoria-falls.html

"1. What is the cluster?
We are installing a new compute cluster that is based on Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 Servers. At the start, about half of these servers are available, one login node called vflogin0 and the compute nodes named vf0001.... We will add the other nodes as testing and configuration work is completed, for a total of 78.

Each of these nodes includes two 1.2 Ghz UltraSparc T2+ chips. Each of these chips has 8 compute cores, and each core is capable of Chip Multi Threading with 8 hardware threads. This means that each of the nodes is capable of working simultaneously on up to 128 threads. Once fully installed, the cluster, called "Victoria Falls" will be able to process almost 10,000 threads."

Edited 2008-05-05 00:50 UTC

Indeed. That would have been a more pertinent and interesting question, rather than getting bizarre and totally meaningless answers about the iPhone (Sun has a fixation about being Apple for some reason), as well as asking Jonathan how he intends to solve those problems. It's like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic while the band plays some nice ragtime tunes. However, I suppose the interview displays Sun's current status: "What the hell are we going to do?" Novell has much the same problem.

I find it amusing, and not so amusing for the employees themselves, that Sun simply doesn't know how to do redundancies:

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/08/silve...

The golden rule of redundancies is to itemise everything that you need and don't need, get the relevant people told as quickly as possible, and above all, make sure you do it once, and once only. This constant round of layoffs that Sun has every year, or every few months, is destroying the ability of the people left to get any work done. Drip feeding layoffs, quite apart from any other problems you have, can destroy a company itself. Would you work under that? Even funnier, Sun is one of those daft companies that fires people that they eventually realise they need to do some work twelve months later. Comments by some 'anonymous' people here:

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/05/01/sun_q3_down/comments/

Sadly, Sun still believes that its multi-billion dollar revenues and spending from the 90s and around the dot-com boom are sustainable - if only they can fire a whole load of people. For a company with their revenues, a $34 million loss or a $67 million profit is woeful. They're barely breaking even as revenues fall. Getting rid of people isn't enough, as it's pretty clear that their expenses are just far too high. Daft purchases such as MySQL and Innotek are partly to blame, but they're not the whole story.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader, and Jonathan, to work this one out, considering that by various metrics a good three quarters of the servers they manage to sell are x86, and of those, probably a good 70% - 80% have Linux specified as their OS. Unless they can get some returns on their spending on SPARC and Solaris then it's all just dead weight.

Do you have any data for that ludicrous statement?

Well, I know you want to nitpick without addressing the crux of the arguments, but I'll bite.

http://tweakers.net/reviews/649/last/database-test-sun-ultrasparc-t...

There should be some reasonable data in there for you to digest. The crux is that Sun's x86 Opteron servers are outselling SPARC by a wide margin. It's a question of volume, and that's why Sun had to move to it. Having their SPARC be outperformed and still be more expensive in the same target market isn't helping.

http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,s...

Given that Linux has traditionally been installed on x86 and that's where Sun's SPARC lunch was eaten, that's fairly logical. It's difficult to justify Solaris under those circumstances.


In all honesty, that doesn't surprise me. If the opposite was true, the Solaris folks would be trumpeting it from the hills. They're not.

That's the long and the short of it, and alas, there isn't much cheer to be had. Sun have some good stuff, and with good leadership they could be doing very well, but due to inertia and poor management decisions that isn't going to happen.

You are beyond hope at this point. Your reading and comprehension skills seem to be non existent.

Look at the charts. The chart on the left is Total Server shipments. On the right x86 shipments.

Q406
Total Server: Approx 100,000 units.
X86 servers: 30,000 Units.
Sparc Server (total - x86) = 70,000 units


Doh!





Sun sells more SPARC systems running Solaris than all the x86 systems combined. See above.



But the opposite is true but your feeble mind can't comprehend it. Sorry try again.



You are grasping at straws making silly statements with no real data to back them up.

Edited 2008-05-05 02:33 UTC

Everytime I see 'job cuts' and 'economic slow down/recession' - I have to ask, do these management types see that their actions are actually creating the self fulfilling prophecy of the recession on the horizon? I don't want to turn this into a thread over business but what they should be doing during an economic down turn is pumping money into product investments, increase their product portfolio, hire more engineers and so forth. When the economy does swing up - and customer start demanding more software and hardware - the said company is in a good position to provide those goods and services demanded in a growing economy.

As for OpenSolaris, Java and so forth; its happening gradually, and personally, I'd sooner see it take time to form than trying to rush things out (like we see in the Linux world) of distributions being pushed out to meet a deadline which are riddled up the wazoo with bugs and issues. There is a fine line between wanting to be on the cutting edge and getting out the latest technology - and just being plan stupid when it comes to incorporating things that are damn risky (SELinux, Fedora and numerous driver issues anyone?).

That story serious misrepresents what Sun is actually doing. MySQL was proposing to release ADDITIONAL optional components that would probably be closed source. Sun would potential go back on this plan and make them open source anyways. Someone got a whiff of the issue and blew it out of proportion and basically turned it on its head. Sun is NOT planning to close source MySQL, they are not turning their backs on open source.

I'd be inclined to agree. Sun has done alot for open source. OpenOffice, Netbeans, Java (yes, with a little proding.. lol), ZFS, Solaris, Dtrace, the list goes on, i cant imagine them removing an open product from the market.

I can, however, see them making closed source extensions, addons and such....like (the now defunct) Star Office, or (the now defunt) Forte/Sun One studio...and of course (the not so defunct) Solaris.

This is a GOOD thing, Sun can then license technology from commerical companies and bring it to the mysql community.

Star Office is defunct?

He is talking about the Sun One Studio/Forte, not StarOffice or OpenOffice.

Wow, Sorry, I didnt realize Star Office was still around lol I was sure it died around version 6 lol The point still stands, but its nice to have facts straight too lol

the sun will come out tomorrow. You can bet on it.

Opinions are like assholes; everyone things everyone else's stinks. The reality is that one shouldn't take benchmarks all that seriously; look at the information and make the decision yourself - don't rely on so-called experts or benchmarks because most of their time they're wildly distorted to what reality is.

That applies more to posts like this one.