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SUNW cracks me up.

The Inquirer has a new article where Sun Microsystems unveils that they have begun work on the UltraSparc VII - that's 7.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/27182.html

Meanwhile, they still haven't launched the UltraSparc IIIi - that's 3i - that they unveiled at last year's Microprocessor Forum.

http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2001-10/sunflash.20011016.5.html

Meanwhile, how are UltraSparc IV, V, and VI doing in development?

According to Sun's David Yen, USVI work has been underway "for some time".

Sure.

UltraSparc V is supposed to be the big, multicore, multithreaded monster that guesses how to optimize for different kinds of parallelism, or so I remember from reading an article in MPR one time. But recently, I hadn't heard anything to confirm that USV was even still in development.

As for UltraSparc IV, the Inquirer puts it this way: Earlier, Yen displayed UltraSPARC IV silicon for the first time. But blink and you'll have missed it: and it was intended to be ironic.

Sun's David Yen can't quite wait to lay the smack down on Intel, though: "Last week Intel rushed in and desperately tried to persuade people that Itanium is still alive. All they could do was show Maddison silicon. This is working UltraSPARC IV silicon," he said, taking the die from his breast pocket.

Oh, I get it. He's joking around and flashing processor die, claiming "working silicon", but God only knows how well it actually works, since no demonstrations were available. Meanwhile, "all Intel could do" was demonstrate working Madison chips running enterprise level databases in a real world environment, while demonstrating hot swap RAS functionality between processor nodes of McKinley and Madison processors, and showing a real perceived increase in performance. But how can that possibly compare with a chunk of silicon in Yen's breast pocket? <VVBG>

Sun is DES-PER-ATE. I've never seen such undeserved smack coming from a company that has absolutely no sense of execution in their processor development. It's not even a case of the pot calling the kettle black. It's Sun that has the delivery problems. Most of their high end servers have still only been qualified for up to 900MHz processors. Not the 1.05GHz processors that were launched in march, and certainly not the 1.2GHz processor that was just released. Instead, all I could find is a press release bragging about 1.015GHz?!? processors now being used on their Sunfire 280R servers.

http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2002-09/sunflash.20020910.2.html

Meanwhile, their brand new entry-level servers still use the UltraSparc IIi (230SPECint, 261SPECfp), making them REALLY entry level (or on par with a 500MHz Pentium III in SPECint and an 800MHz Pentium III in SPECfp).

So...... if I understand Sun correctly, they think that they can announce work on an UltraSparc VII, when UltraSparc IIIi doesn't even exist and UltraSparc IIi is still used in brand new systems, and then talk smack on Intel's Madison processor, which has been shown in real world enterprise level demonstrations, while their UltraSparc IV is just a chunk of silicon (by the way, have they shown USIIIi yet?).

Like I said, Sun is desperate. I've never seen a company so behind and still try to make it seem like they are leading the industry. Not even AMD tries stunts like this.

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