Analysis on IT trends and competitive strategies, with emphasis on micro processors, computer systems and networks. Based on latest news, backed up with real data, this site intends to provide a true and realtime picture of the fast changing IT landscape. This journal strives to be accurate on facts and sharp on criticisms. You may email your opinion to sharikou@yahoo.com or post comments here, be cool and intelligent.
Freelance journalist on IT matters. Some of my writings have been published on online IT journals. Any original content on this journal is Copyrighted, but it's free for non-commercial use. Any Trademarks used on this site belong to their respective owners. Some of the pictures are links. If there is any issue with the content of this site, please email sharikou@yahoo.com .
Read the exchange here. It's amusing.
posted by Sharikou, Ph. D. @ 7/10/2006 06:53:00 PM
12 Comments:
Wow, Sun has the absolute best brain bank on the planet. HP knows it. This time next year, the world could be a very different place.
HP is doing its best to put some sort of happy face on their completely flawed decision to partner with Intel on Itanic.
How foolish HP was and feels today is directly related to the amount of mud they are slinging at Sun.
So HP has to pump up their sales force because customers are starting to ask tough questions... like
"How come all your stuff, HP, is just like the Dell stuff... but costs twice as much???"
"How come you always are pushing that early adopter broken stuff on us?"
"Why should we pay more for a server that offers half the cores as AMD?"
And the questions go on and on...
You look at HP's server lineup and it is all boring stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if HP buys all its stuff from Dell and just slaps a HP sticker on the front and jacks up the price. Sort of like many of the Lexus models being nothing more than gussied up Toyotas. If only Dell were 10% as reliable as Toyota... :-(
I suppose you buy a Dell or HP Woodcress system if you've gotten tired of your RAID system and just want to give your data the big boot to never-never land.
Smart buyers will wait until 2007 when the real "SE" (Server Edition) of Core Duo comes out.
funny how the HP opteron blades just fly out the door! probably >%50 of all opterons sold to date are HP blades!
This again will not be posted by sharik, but just for his eyes:
You AMD fanbois should stop rejecting IA-64 as viable and growing RISC replacement. Just have a look at market figures. Latest Q1'06 server tracker reports show almost 2x increase in Itanium shipments vs decline in RISC. Majority of these shipments are in high-end, scale-up segment and come at the expense of Sun Fire. SPARC is dead. Sun will compete with Dell, HP and IBM in x86 market and will lose in less than 3 years, ending up as SW company
1969 the movie “2001 Space Odyssey” introduced to the world a futuristic computer named Hal that was suppose to happen in the year 2001. As a young man I was blown away, so much so that I saw the movie twice on opening day, my life change that day. Fast forward 37 years to 2006 and just maybe AMD’s Torrenza and Sun is the perfect match to begin breeding technology into such a fantastic machine that I dreamed about so many years ago. Maybe.
Thanks
"Latest Q1'06 server tracker reports show almost 2x increase in Itanium shipments vs decline in RISC. Majority of these shipments are in high-end, scale-up segment and come at the expense of Sun Fire."
Itanium (EPIC) has good performance only when the software is optimized, usually floating-point apps. The "high-end, scale-up segment" you mentioned are probably for those computationally expensive scientific apps, which is a rather small market. I heard that Intel had this buy-one-get-one-free promotion for Itanium - I wonder whether that's how they got 2x sales. ;-p
Sun's T1 OTOH works on a completely different principle. It employs 32 simple in-order threads. This type of processors is best for general-purpose servers like httpd, database, storage, Java, etc.
"SPARC is dead. Sun will compete with Dell, HP and IBM in x86 market and will lose in less than 3 years, ending up as SW company"
If it were 2 years ago I might've agreed with you that SPARC is dead. But Sun's Niagara and the following Rock are very innovative and promising for their respective target. Now I'm willing to give Sun's processors a second thought.
BTW, even Itanium has to include hardware x86 support.
2edward:
Try to answer following questions for yourself. I'll give my opinion.
What is driving SPARC sales now ? Broad installed base
What is happening to SPARC in two coming years ?
Two migrations: first from US4+ to APL from FSC (total box replacement), then from APL to Rock (again total box replacement)
Now, given above, IBM, HP, Dell and others will take as much as possible out of that. SPARC installed base will shrink dramatically, and Opteron will replace SPARC.
Next question then - will Sun be able to compete with Opteron/Solaris where SPARC/Solaris was ?
"funny how the HP opteron blades just fly out the door! probably >%50 of all opterons sold to date are HP blades!"
Just imagine for a second if HP had not been smart enough to have some of their business go with AMD. HP would have a bunch of stone cold dead Itanic machines sitting in cobwebs in their warehouses and be getting killed by Dell on the low end.
AMD Opteron is the only thing that has kept HP's server business alive and growing.
But that doesn't mean HP as a corporation is going to come out and admit their stupidity about making a strategic partnership with Intel and how it is all one big write off at this point.
HP will only be helping themselves and their shareholders by admitting Itanic is a pile of crap and they are dumping the whole thing.
If Intel were smart, they would dump Itanic right now and put all their resources into making great x86 chips. But instead they are trying to convince the world that their laptop chip is really the be-all end-all server chip too. Which is a joke. There has not been one innovative Intel chip since Pentium Pro. That's a long time.
As for HP, the more distance they put between themselves and the unethical, uninspired, and untalented clowns at Intel, the better.
Slightly offtopic but worth mentioning here.
There is one thing everyone share from Intel fanboys to Intel hiups.
Remember what craig said.
We'll cross 10 G by 2006 and reach 100 G by 2010.
Fighting against the laws of physics they had their asses fried by hitting the thermal wall.
Ok that was yesterday , so whtas their plans for tomorrow?
More or less the same.
Quite soon we will be on 45 nm and in no time at all 22 nm and so on.
It's the same thinking same remarks written everywhere , even read this blog you may find the same mentality same wording time after time after time.
Yes you got it it's called BRUTE FORCE.
Brute forcing runs in their minds and in their blood. Instead of focusing the efforts on a better architecture they chose brute forcing techniques.
I mean what else could you call that huge pile of cache junk?
Look at their roadmap for the future , can you make some sense out of it ? at least i can't.
Sound s like another spell of brute force to me.
They ran out of GHZ steam and 45 nm seem to be saving their day for now.But what is gonna save intel after nm runs out ??
why do't they concentrate on innovation and good engineering WHY?
"Yes you got it it's called BRUTE FORCE.
Brute forcing runs in their minds and in their blood. Instead of focusing the efforts on a better architecture they chose brute forcing techniques."
This mentality is Andy Grove's mentality.
Some types of people are not inherently capable of making the world a better place. All they exist for is an endless brutal war. Some say it is driven by paranoia, others say it is because these people are inherently evil. Either way, the companies that are run by these people end up being some of the worst in history, exacting a horrible toll on people, the planet, and peace.
To igor:
"What is driving SPARC sales now ? Broad installed base"
Versus what? POWER? x86? It might be true that SPARC share is shrinking, but more on this below.
"What is happening to SPARC in two coming years ?
Two migrations: first from US4+ to APL from FSC (total box replacement), then from APL to Rock (again total box replacement)"
Total box replacement doesn't mean much. Many "upgrades" from Dell/Intel or IBM required that, too. Also, AFAIK Rock doesn't replace APL; their targeted apps are different.
Last, the fact that virtualization is taking off, and that AMD's Torrenza is becoming reality, and that future SPARC & Opterons will share the same socket, gives SPARC a much brighter road ahead, IMHO. I believe that's the point of this blog, anyway.
Sun is a dying company - they haven't made a profit since the days of 2001, when companies had more money than sense. Since then, jistifying their value has been around ISV lock-in. Anything that could port to Windows-X86 or Linux-86 is being adopted by the IT industry.
The world is standardizing and moving to X86 architecture - Intel and AMD.
Fewer and fewer companies are choosing to stay on big boxes (8-socket or greater).
Even vmware is not encouraging companies to choose larger servers - over 80% of vmware licenses are for 4-socket, 2-socket or 1-socket servers.
Post a Comment
<< Home