And now what?

IBMers said that Larry would kill of Sparc, but let us see what the future holds. As I have said earlier, the Power6+ CPU can not compete with the new Niagara design on certain server workloads. It is too slow. The Power6+ relies on having a big and fast cache, but no matter how big, the cache will never be able to fit in a whole server workload with many clients. The only way forward, is to build a new design which is not dependent on a cache - i.e. Niagara SPARC. That is the reason Niagara can have a small cache and still crush CPUs that has much higher frequence and much larger cache. Large cache and high frequency is obsolete, Legacy.

Many cores are the future. Which IBM has always smacked SUN for. I wouldnt be surprised if IBM will turn to many cores instead of a few cores trying to reach 6-7 GHz. That is just a dead end. I hope IBM will realize it soon. But maybe not.

.

And please, stop using the number of cores when comparing CPUs. Instead, say that the TPC-C IBM record used 32 CPUs. If Niagara can break it with fewer CPUs then Niagara is faster.

Who says that the nr of cores is the important metric? It is subjective. You could as well use the frequency instead. "IBM has the TPC-C record with 4.7GHz CPUs". That doesnt say anything. Neither does "IBM has the TPC-C record with 64 cores". Maybe it is one CPU with 64 cores? That CPU would be awesome. It is more correct to say "IBM has the TPC-C record with 32 cpus" - when you want to show that a CPU is faster than another CPU. If you say "64 cores" then you can claim that IBM has faster cores - but that doesnt mean that the entire CPU is faster. Please stop that FUD.