RE: Sun's 'Niagara' family of Sparc T servers are VERY competitive!!!
You can always relie on Novatose! Even after the market has shown how little they believe the Sunshine he's out there plugging away, spewing out SPEC stats.
"....The CoolThreads T family was built for web facing applications......" Hold on a sec, is this the admission that Niagara is designed for the web niche that Novatose was so energetically denying earlier this year? Last time he was insisting it was perfect for enterprise apps like Oracle and SAP, but now he admits it's just a webserving wannabe. Problem with that admission is - although it's a very large niche - it means customers will look at the broad swathe of uses they can put their flexible x64 servers to, then look at the narrow spectrum of where Niagara makes sense, and they will largely go with the general purpose x64. If it was any otherwise you'd see web companies like Google throwing out all their cookie-tray x64 servers and buying nothing but Niagara, and we know that didn't happen.
".....For what the CoolThreads T processor are built for, they are very competitive, consistently being years ahead in throughput performance against X64 processor released." Which means they are completely irrellevant for 99% of the tasks customers buy x64 servers for, because x64 performs adequately to very well at a much lower price and with a much wider range of apps. The reality is Niagara is simply too expensive and too restricted to survive, especially in a downturn, even if it does outperfrom x64 in one niche area.
People like Novatose may still be daydreaming but I suspect Larry has already seen the light, and it ain't Sunshine. It's simple maths. Unless Larry can find a way to balance the books so that the money made by Niagara in its webserving niche exceeds the costs of developing, building and selling the servers then he will simply not do it. The only way for Larry to come even close would be a massive reduction in the Sun hardware business, which the cancellation of Rock was probably a precursor to, but he will have to cut a lot closer to the bone soon. Hence the rumours of the rest of the hardware bizz being offered again to companies like hp.
/SP&L