Rob,
Your post on the article declaring
"The Itanium processor is perhaps the most robust
processor ever built. With Intel's billions of dollars of
research and development funds pouring into its
development, it will be virtually impossible for the Alpha
processor to maintain any current lead for much longer."
I agree that's quite a sweeping statement for this early in the game. Some other comments on your points:
Maybe the guy is just getting started or has Sun confused
with Compaq's Alpha. The UltraSparc III rolls at year-end
but MPF just last week , Sun presented UltraSparc V aka
"Millenium". Doesn't it sound impressive? You gotta
love Sun's marketing. They really do try. Anyhow, if you
look at the numbers that Sun is estimating (gee, how hard
can this estimating stuff be?
The reasons Sun sells a tremendous amount of Solaris servers from the $50K to over a million each range is because they have earned the reputation of best of breed in the Unix (Solaris) server space. If pressured, I don't think they'd claim it is because they have an individual microprocessor chip to surpass the best Compaq or Intel or IBM has. Why should they care, individual chip speed is only a part of what sells servers. Scalability, RAS, and software robustness, and probably most importantly, the fact that Unix is not going away are what have Sun flying high.
"perhaps the most robust processor ever built"
That's a silly statement. So it has some fancy error
correcting built in at the hardware level. The 21364 will
support lockstepping. A *must* if you are supporting a
fault-tolerant OS for the Tandem folks i.e. NSK. You really
can't get more robust than that. Will it add to the
server cost? Shertainly. Let the marketing types fight
that one out. Point is, you can't get more robust than
lockstepping.
I would hope that Compaq Alpha can well satisfy Tandem's robust processor requirements because Compaq owns Tandem. I agree that lockstepping is getting there for ultimate reliability, at least as far as can be achieved today.
General comment: you sure do defend Alpha with a lot of vigor, almost, however, to the point of being overly defensive.
Tony |
