Dan, inadvertenly, I think this is a good example of the pressure sun is under, like it or don't and this is why sunw is flipflopping around with 'Mandy:
REALITY CHECK
Solaris 9 on Itanium: Whose call?
By David Berlind
June 19, 2002
What's standing in the way of Solaris running on Intel's 32- and 64-bit architectures? It could be a simple phone call.
I've said this before: Sun ought to offer its software--including its Solaris operating system--on Intel's 32- and 64-bit architectures. Whether Sun admits it or not, plenty of Solaris shops are trying to figure out their next step: Do they stick with Sparc--or switch? There's something they like about the way Intel system vendors drive down prices by competing with each other. And despite FUD noise levels by Intel's processor competitors (primarily Sun with Sparc and IBM with Power), these shops don't doubt that IA-64 (Intel's 64-bit architecture) will shrink the performance gap, if not close it all together. At the very least, they know that Intel architectures will soon (and perhaps already do) have enough horsepower for some of their less performance-intensive applications.
But, if Sparc is your source and IA-32 or IA-64 is your destination, you don't have a lot of choices for operating systems: Linux, HP-UX, BSD Unix, or Windows. Judging by my mail, none of these would be as ideal as Solaris--if Sun offered it. While all four are respectable alternatives, there's apparently a lot of legacy stuff out there that can't be so easily migrated to another OS. (Not that a lot of stuff wouldn't have to be recompiled anyway.)
Not only would an Intel option for Solaris ease the lives of some Solaris shops, it might not be a bad move for Sun either. With an Intel option for Solaris, Sun has a shot at keeping some customers that are considering the switch. Without such an option, Sun could lose them altogether.
Intel willing to talk
When we interviewed Intel CEO Craig Barrett, he stressed the simplicity of Intel's volume/price/performance business model and opined that the margins on Sun's Sparc-based servers would one day evaporate. Why then, we asked Barrett, did he suppose that Sun
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