@VirtualGreg,@Jesper Frimann: Afara & Innovation

DavidHalko posts, "That's OK - Sun pioneered in heavily multi-core'ed and muti-threaded CPU architecture... and the rest of the market continues to emulate with Intel being the fastest to catch up."

VirtualGreg posts, "calling Sun an innovator with respect to Niagara - do some fact checking - Sun bought Afara to get Niagara technology - its no Sun innovation!"

Jesper Frimann posts, "Well it wasn't really SUN, SUN bought the company that made the TX000 servers, it was AFAIR one of the 'original' SUN guys who made that company."

VirtualGreg and Jesper Frimann, you may not be aware, but I wrote the original article with most of the content and references on Wikipedia for Afara!!! ;-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afara_Websystems

Afara did not have a piece of SPARC silicon when Sun invested in them. Sun brought SPARC CoolThreads into fruition. Almost a half-decade later and Sun is still the most significant octal-core CPU vendor on the market.

DavidHalko posts, "Sun = Innovation ; IBM = Business"

Jesper posts, "I think you are very wrong."

Your opinion is very fair - I can appreciate your point of view, I think we just disagree.

While Sun was doing the heavy-lifting by engineering heavily multi-core and multi-threaded processors into a single piece of silicon, others were cobbling together multi-core using multi-chip modules.

Some may argue that the MCM's were innovative engineering, disagree and suggest MCM's are a pragmatic business-man's short term solution to a technical problem.