Sun Microsystems (JAVA)

[chipguy]

Two points I'd like to make Intel fanboy.

Name calling is a violation of ihub TOS.

First, Sun sells Intel based servers so clearly, they are excited as you are about Intels upcoming processors. Sun's Xeon based servers are hard to beat!

ROFL. Sun sells less than $200m of x86 based servers per
quarter, a tiny sliver of the $7B per quarter x86 market.
Once Sun grew x86 sales quickly but this has stalled and
Sun is far, far back of HP, Dell, and IBM. So in the real
world buyers disagree strongly with your assessment of
the competitiveness of Sun's x86 products.

Secondly, you are comparing future Intel CPUs to current, shipping Sun CMT T-Series servers.

Nehalem will be officially released in nine days. No doubt
you think Sun will redesign/shrink its Niagara 2 processor
and release it in a new single socket box before then.

However in the real world Sun has one of the least comp-
etent and most schedule slip prone MPU teams left in the
business. And that is before the cost cutting and layoffs
that are clearly in the cards.

Today, the T5440 can't be beat on performance or price/performance by any other 4 x socket server and outperforms many 8 x socket servers even Power6 servers from IBM costing 4-5x more!

Only on low ILP, high MLP, finely threaded homogenous
throughput workloads. Sun's idiot-convention-on-a-chip
based processors and systems cannot be considered as
general purpose servers like Power, IPF, x86, or even
Fujitsu SPARC64 VII based systems. Most real usage
is performance constrained by serialized code sections
or entire applications. Ever heard of Amdahl's law? In
such cases Sun's Niagara family choke badly. A single
thread on a T2 has less than 1/12th the performance
of a single thread on a Core i7.

Sun's declining overall SPARC sales over the past few
years shows that growing niche sales, even as quickly
as Sun has grown Tx sales, can't make up for declining
main stream market sales. Given how fast Intel x86 is
evolving it remains to be seen how long Sun can keep
even its niche CMT SPARC sales growing.