This is just pure speculation, but maybe one of the reasons media (like the NY Times) keeps saying that "the Rock is dead" is because that new eight core Fujitsu chip, the SPARC64 VIIIfx, codenamed "Venus" is so fast that it just destroys everything including the best Intel chips, the best AMD chips, and the best IBM Power chips and it was going to be ready for production sooner than the Rock would have been.
Check out this link called "Fujitsu unveils the world's fastest CPU": http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1137342/fujitsu-unveils-world-s-fastest-cpu I really wonder what the problems were with Rock though that made David Yen leave for Juniper and Marc Tremblay leave for Microsoft. The Rock CPU is one of the coolest ideas I've ever heard of for a new CPU design, but radically changing the whole CPU paradigm like this seems like it is something that would take MANY years of R&D to pull off (maybe even a full decade of R&D). I also think it's kind of shameful that IBM and the re-animated undead zombie skeleton of SGI have been taking up a lot of the top super-computer slots (see link below): http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009/july/top500.html when SUN / Fujitsu should rightfully be dominating the area of high performance computing. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
