Fingolfen, or anyone else have any experience with or knowledge about the credence of "Client Server News"?
To:cheryl williamson who wrote (40959)
From: Brian Sullivan Tuesday, Feb 6, 2001 2:22 PM
Respond to of 41011
Reality Check on Ultra Sparc III:
g2news.com
From Client Server NEWS
Sun Isn't Shining
Dear, dear, dear, dear, dear. As Intel goes with the Itanium so goes Sun with the UltraSparc and it doesn't go well in either case. Sun, for instance, is having a terrible time getting yields from TI's UltraSparc III factory. According to practice, there's a minimum allowable failure rate before a wafer factory scraps the whole lot. UltraSparc is reportedly failing the minimum and Sun has been forced to go back and validate the remaining wafers by hand. Sources say it's happening with both the aluminum and copper lines, although the copper line is a tad better off. Sun reportedly faces the same issue with the higher-clocked UltraSparc IIs. Sun's new server, by the way, is not expected to ship now till October, official statements to the contrary. If true, that would make it three years late. Rumors have the E3500 ready to go end-of-life without the new servers being ready to go. The boxes Sun's currently selling, the 3500s-6500s, are basically the same junk Sun came out with in '95. They made some minor enhancements and renamed them, but the stuff is old. The vaunted E10000 is way behind everyone else. Compaq, HP and IBM have newer, more stable technology, even if Sun has the mind share. Sun's performance is poor, and costs and concerns about end-of-life are running rampant. Add all the up-time problems they've faced, the UltraSparc II spasms they've experienced and the NDAs they used to cover them up and, well, you've got one very cloudy day. Merrill Lynch's Tom Kraemer is starting to wise up and on Tuesday morning put out a note saying Sun might not introduce its mid-range server line at its analysts meeting on February 5 and might not even say when it might at the meeting. "We think this may be perceived as a near-term negative," he wrote. "This is important, in our view, because the new microprocessors alleviate some of the price pressures that Sun is increasingly under because of IBM and its new products." Yeah, well, if we've got this right, part of Sun's problem relates to error correcting and parity and choosing price over reliability. |
