Replies to post #40281 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[upc]

It seems evident now that the whole Opteron promotion was a short-term fling.

Forgive me for expressing my disagreement but I cannot fathom how one draws such a conclusion from the facts at hand. Is there some other point of information beyond an alpha port of Solaris to Itanium that you are using to come to this rather remarkable conclusion? It seems to me that the Opteron workstations and 4 way server launching this month, together with the forthcoming work of the company they acquired earlier with the old Sun employee Bechtelshom would strongly suggest otherwise.

upc

[I_banker]

The only thing the IPF/Power port announcement indicates is that Sun is thinking longer term and they realize that Linux may well improve to the point that Unix is dead. What they are trying to do is reunify Unix (under the Solaris brand) and put it forth as a better alternative to Linux. They are trying to do this before Linux catches and while they can leverage their reputation with large corporates.

I think they will support this "Solaris everywhere" effort with an open source version of Solaris. They will probably use the Sun License or something similar, but definitely not the GPL.

This will tap into a huge pool of developer talent, parrticularly as it applies to Power/IPF/Alpha/PA-RISC type chips, to whom they can offload the majority of the porting and maintenance work.

I think Sun believes they can offer a Solaris product for the same cost as Red Hat Linux, but which is far superior and that entrprise customers will flock to it.

[j3pflynn]

wbmw - I disagree. I see the Itanium port more likely as a "keeping one's options open" move, which is usually wise. Do you really believe they'd have Andy and his team working so hard on Opteron systems, and that they'd be about to release a 4-way, and , soon to follow, an 8-way system if they didn't know where they were headed with it?
Paul

[sgolds]

wbmw, Sun - this is an intriguing development, although some of what you posted misses the mark:

Maybe Intel's EM64T announcement destroyed any advantage that Sun thought they would have against the other vendors.

I should point out that Sun's stated strategy with Opteron from the beginning has been to expand their less expensive offerings and build volume. Current reported efforts by Sun to port Solaris to Itanium and Power do not conflict at all with their public position with regards to Opteron.

However, it does have interesting implications:

1. Some of us, including me, have speculated that Sun will work with AMD on K9 and future architectures to grow Opteron beyond their lower end offerings. This news shows there is no special arrangement there. :(

2. The SPARC folks must be sweating bullets around now. Sun spoke highly of evolving SPARC into a massively parrallel high end architecture, this news is contrary to that position.

3. And this should definitely scare you if you're a SUNW investor.

I agree! (Luckily, I do not hold SUNW; I do hold MSFT which had much, much better news this week. :)

So what it Sun's high end strategy? SPARC? Itanium? Power? Are they trying to out-IBM IBM by offering all this stuff - now there is a recipe for disaster!

If I were in charge at Sun, I'd guide a certain amount of dynamic competition to determine the best strategy for high end computing. I would not take a shotgun approach of three high end architectures, as implied today. I would support pilot projects to see what the single focussed strategy should entail.

Supporting Solaris on four architectures will split their market into too many tiny segments, cause irritating incompatibilities, make too many configurations to test affordably and result in lots of finger pointing between the OS folks and the hardware folks when bugs appear. What does a hardware person say when an important bug appears on their platform? "Does it reproduce on the other processors?" If not then the hardware folks wind up chasing a problem which may very well be in the OS but only appear on their particular configuration. If it does appear on other processors the software folks chase problems which may be in a common hardware component between systems. Lots of expensive hours go by as each group (already busy) passes the buck.

A real mess.

Other than that, it is a great idea!

I was considering purchasing Sun stock a while ago, but decided to hold off. Now I am very glad I did! They are ping-ponging between different answers to their deteriorating market position. It is past time for them to focus on a single strategy and do it well!

I will note that they did not make any Power or Itanium product commitments, merely acknowleged that they are working on these Solaris ports. It may never see the light of day. I guess they are running the idea up the flag pole, and watching to see if anyone salutes.

One-fingered salutes don't count.