Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[chipguy]

Elmer, the stupid thing is that Sparc itself is just a small part of what Sun has. They are not in cpu business.

No, they are not in the chip fabrication business. But they
are very much in the CPU business. They boast how they have
over 1000 engineers working on SPARC and this effort probably
costs in the range of $200m to $300m per year.

HP decided they couldn't afford to stay in the CPU business
and so did DECpaq and SGI. They only thing that seems to be
keeping Sun from deciding that too is McNealy. Sun could
afford to p!ss away $300m a year making house brand CPUs that
were far slower merchant chips during the dot com boom. But
now the chickens have come home to roost.

Sparc is just a helper, a sideeffect of their business. The only thing holding Sun with Sparc is binary compatibility and unique instruction set that makes the whole Sun infrostructure a small universe, where many customers live.

I think Solaris and server experience are still distinctive enough to keep Sun running. Adoption of x86 instruction set is painful, but once done, will keep them going. The hardware they make is still distinctive enough to prevent succesful cloning. Noone will buy IBM servers to install Solaris on them.

SPARC was highly successful in the late 1980s and became the
RISC of choice for commercial computing. This made Sun/OS
and later Solaris the most popular development platform for
mid-range applications. The remaining value of Sun is almost
entirely tied up in Solaris. SPARC is a POS in its dying days.
If Sun doesn't move Solaris to another platform then it will
sink into oblivion with SPARC and so will the company. How
long until shareholder's concerns overcome Scooter's ego?
Who knows. I suspect it will be too late regardless.