dmf - Re: "Would you add any of your own comments on Scott McNeely and SUNW and any Intel alliances "
McNeely has looked down his nose at Intel for many years because his (SUN's) SPARC microprocessors ruled the WORKSTATION market. In fact, they deserved to rule the market because of the fast (at that time) SPARC CPUs, highly developed UNIX (SUNOS and layter SOLARIS) operating systems and high speed graphics and memory subsystems.
With the advent of the Pentium Pro in late 1995 and subsequent Pentium II, as well as new 3'rd party graphics accelerators, Intel's CPUs have begun to make major inroads in the workstation market. Windows NT has been helpful in this as well.
The Pentium Pro has also begun to take a major role in servers - especially in 2 and 4-way (CPU) SMP systems. However, SUN has managed to move up the performance curve and keep (and expand) the high end multi-processor (>8) Enterprise Server and deliver an excellent operating system that can make use of all these CPUs (at least 64 of them). The Pentium Pro is throttled by Windows NT which seems to work fine with 4 CPUs but has trouble at 8 and seems not to even be considerd (today) for >8 CPUs.
Thus, SUN still owns the large Enterprise server arena. They also provide one-stop shopping, especially for internet servers supplying turn-key hardware and software. Their support is also very good.
Basically, McNeely/SUN have been very nimble in exploiting their strengths and manuevering into lucrative areas as Intel encroaches into their older, lower priced, market segments.
Intel seems to openly support SUN's JAVA initiative and has written (or at least greatly optimized) the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) for Pentium compatible CPUs. So there is common ground for working together - Sun and Intel. I think both companies openly acknowledge this.
As the Merced approaches, SUN is moving forward with their own latest new SPARC variant, targeting the same large multi-processor (up to 1000? CPUs), so the super-Server game will be re-played in the next year or two.
I give McNeely and Sun a lot of credit for their concept and implemntation of delivering the whole package - CPU and OS - and providing real value for their customers. However, they are "alone" and are defending this turf by themselves.
Intel, however, has a ton of companies supporting its hardware and software - a formidable challenge for Sun over the next few years.
Paul |
