Yeah, this kinda goes back to my theory that UltraSPARC-KT probably performs better than ROCK and will have a better price point.
As for software, most of the legacy apps that companies created or use are indeed garbage and incapable of taking advantage of multi-core or multi-threaded processors. Unfortunately, technologies such as VMware will enable customers to keep such applications around for a bit longer (i.e. running WindowsNT, old versions of Linux, and even old versions of Solaris x86). The flip side is that all the major software vendors have put funding and effort into making their products scale properly on CMT and multi-core/multi-threaded platforms. It's now a matter of time before programmers figure out how to really take advantage of the hardware, OS, and libraries. In many ways, Sun is way ahead of the curve and unfortunately, the market wasn't ready. Also doesn't help when the economy is down and customers are not willing to re-build their applications. Intel and AMD have seen the light that higher clock speeds will not help and that there are limits. It'll be up to programmers to take advantage of the technology. Hopefully Sun will learn and take a more conservative approach and build on the success of the UltraSPARC-T1 and UltraSPARC-T2/T2+. Getting the performance up there like Fujitsu did with SPARC64 VIIIfx should be a goal. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com E-Mail: unixcons...@yahoo.com *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----- Original Message ---- From: UNIX admin <tripivc...@hotmail.com> To: opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org Sent: Saturday, July 11, 2009 3:56:54 PM Subject: Re: [osol-discuss] SPARC Rock is dead, > I really wonder what the problems were with Rock > though that made David Yen leave for Juniper and Marc > Tremblay leave for Microsoft. 12% to 25% over UltraSPARC T2+ performance gains were cited by Sun's own sales reps. Some of the performance examples cited 2% - 7% improvement. I don't know about you, but in my opinion, that's miserable. Couple that with the fact that most customers' software is such garbage that it's not capable of running on more than one CPU, and therefore most customers aren't not able to take advantage of many slow performing hardware threads, and the disaster becomes pretty apparent. Sun had a good idea, but they either didn't want to invest enough funding, or didn't know how to make their existing UltraSPARC design into a powerful number cruncher, like IBM did with POWER. However, Fujitsu did manage to do that with SPARC, but their hardware is so exorbitantly expensive, that it makes store.sun.com look like selling peanuts in comparison. If that isn't a recipe for disaster, then I don't know what is. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
