Re: I sure do not share your vision! [re SUN]
I understand your concerns, but I think you're underestimating the importance of SUN's engineering teams.
Keep in mind that, even after buying several companies that were successfully making multiprocessor chipsets, Intel can't seem to produce one itself (leaving Dell without a competitive high end system).
I do not know why it is so hard to build a successful large scale system, but the fact is that there are only 4 teams in the world that can do so: IBM's, HP's, SUN's, and Fujitsu-Siemens'.
Given that IBM has Power and HP has Itanium (so that neither is likely to give enterprise support to AMD), to have AMD supported by SUN is a very big deal. Fujitsu-Siemens has been using Sparc and Itanium - it will be interesting to see how long that situation holds.
SUN has terrific engineering skills, both in hardware and in software, and the software part is at least as important as the hardware. SUN is just as capable of putting together a cheater compiler as is Intel - and that is a huge, major, vital deal. Intel's stuff has been made to look better than it actually is, relative to AMD, because Intel owns a compiler that can be twisted to present distorted test results.
With SUN's support, AMD will be able to present equally "optimized" results.
Without SUN, AMD has to ship products 20% faster than Intel's, in order to tie Intel in performance tests (due to Intel's use of a distorting compiler). Starting some time next year, AMD need only ship a chip as fast as Intel's, in order to tie it in performance benchmarks. And as long as AMD can continue to ship faster CPUs, it will finally start to get credit for the superb performance of its products, thanks to the partnership with SUN.
Now look at what this does for SUN. SUN's software and system engineering teams have done pretty well during the past decade, despite having been handicapped by CPUs with about the half the performance of their competition. Now consider the products and systems they'll be able to ship when their relative (compared to the the competition) CPU performance increases by 100%, almost overnight.
Sure SUN has been gradually losing share in recent years, but consider how well they've done while handicapped with HALF the performance of their competition. SUN builds superb platforms - now they're going to have superb price performance to go with them. I think they stand a good chance of doing very, very, well.
AI
