RE: Projected Intel, IBM, AMD, and Oracle/SUN/Fujitsu processors

One problem with old Novatose's marketeering - did he call Larry first to get his approval? Fact is, all the "coming" Sun chips mentioned are waiting on Axeman Larry to decide whether Oracle want them or not, and the evidence so far is not. First off, Oracle haven't committed to ANY current Sun hardware, let alone future products. Wonder what the two-week delay was in Sun announcing the Nehalem kit? It wasn't just Sun being slower to market than the other vendors (as they usually are), it was probably because Sun had to ask Oracle for permission to launch the kit. Until Larry stands up and says Rock and T3 are go they are just vapourware, and even less convincing vapourware than when the SPARC fanclub was running Sun.

And even if they do get released, Intel and AMD are hardly going to be quaking in their boots. T3 will still have the same scale problems of all the Niagara lines - Xeon and even the old Barcelona Opteron already out-scales and out-perfroms it. And the Nehalem and Barcelona cores are full-bodied cores with a real pipeline to keep those threads spinning, whereas the whole Sun design is a capitulation to the idea that you can't have all the threads going at once, because Sun couldn't design a bus or core powerful enough to. All T1 and T2 did was cannibalise the existing low-end SPARC base, and even then Sun and FSC finally had to produce a single-SPARC64 M-series server (the M3000) as their customers kept screaming at them that Niagara just didn't do what they wanted. And the final nail in T3's coffin - even if Oracle drop the stupid Sun insistance of pitching Slowaris as the OS of choice instead of Linux, it still can't run Windows, which means it can't compete with the cheaper, more flexible and faster x64 options which can Linux, Windows or even Slowaris x86. Niagara's little webserving niche is not going to be enough to keep T3 alive in Oracle.

Rock? Way too little and far too late, even if they can fix the bugs. Going on the info Sun have released, Rock will be out-performed by the Power5 and old Madison Itanium2 cores it was originally supposed to go up against. Power6 and the latest Montecito Itanium2 cores will comfortably out-perform it, and then there are Power7 and Tukwila Itaniums waiting in the wings. 32-thread Power7 pricing is anyone's guess but likely to be keenly driven as IBM and hp scrap over who gets to migrate all those Sun accounts McNeedy and Ponytail have left in the lurch. Tukzilla-based Integrity servers from hp will come with the big price advantage that Tukwila and Nehalem allow more sharing of components than Power7 and xSeries can, so hp will be able to leverage the economies of scale of that massive ProLiant bizz to keep Integrity costs down. Oracle doesn't have a massive x64 bizz (Galaxy can't be described as a tier1 x64 bizz), and the Galaxy servers don't share components with the Niagara or M-series servers to anything like the same extent. So, Rock and T3 will offer poorer performance and at uncompettive prices. Yeah, I can see Larry jumping with joy at that prospect - not!

IBM aren't keeping the Power6+ as a spoiler to the Rock/T3 announcements, they don't need to. They are keeping it ready for the arrival of Tukzilla this Summer. With hp's new servers due around this September, IBM will want to throw a spoiler in there to stop hp pointing out to all those Sun customers they can have a shiny new Tukzilla server in September or wait another six months plus for Power7. After all, if IBM play it the same way they did Power6, they could start with just one part of the range and that could mean customers actually waiting for Power7 in the servers they need as late as 2011.

Interesting though that Novatose is no longer singing the praises of the Fujitsu SPARC64 chips. Are the Sunshiners just sulking because Fujitsu didn't ride in and save their fantasy world like they insisted FSC would? Or is this a silent admission that even the next gen SPARC64 - if it ever arrives - is going to be just as uncompetitive as Rock?

Larry Ellison isn't blind, unlike McNeedy and Ponytail, and he will know better than to follow their blinkered and comic faith in SPARC. Larry may want the Galaxy servers for his new storage stack, but the rest are just a profits blackhole, and I predict Larry will cut them lose without a second thought.

/Novatose - the comedy gift that keeps on giving.