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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (96602)	3/3/2000 11:41:00 PM
From: Rob Young	Respond to of 1572161

Tench, "Besides, I'm sure Sun knows that Itanium is targeting UltraSparc III, so their negative comments are to be expected. Personally, I would have preferred a warmer relationship between Sun and Intel, but maybe it just wasn't meant to be." I read the whole thing... just trying to drive a point home to Paul and that timely article surfaces... If you think about it, Sun really has little choice but to drag their feet for Itanium support. They're having thoughts, they must have decided it wasn't such a hot idea. Internally they must be looking at some really nasty charts... Think about it... if they push Solaris on Itanium and it really takes off, 2 or 3 years from now when 32 processor Itanium boxes are common coming from Dell and Unisys Sun would lose their fat margins on the UE10000. To make up the UE10000 margins and associated hardware support, they would probably have to do an unrealistic amount of software. Software is headed towards a major shakeout as everyone is tossing their piece into the Linux hat.. SGI the biggest culprit (great logged base filesystem). SGI has decided they are going to ditch Irix in favor of Linux and that must play into Sun's thinking. I talked time and again about Itanium being in a nasty pincer move with very high performance IA32 (I had no idea just how high, with Willamette at 1.4+ GHz and Athlon at 1.2+ GHz and moving to on-chip L2, the IA32 pincer piece is fatter and tougher than I suspected) and very high performance / low-cost EV68 Alphas at the other end for scientific crunching (pointed out to me that $3000 will buy a nice 21264 workstation at 600 MHz .. no name). But we also see glimpes of Solaris being in a nasty pincer too... if they push Itanium it will kill high margin UltraSparc server sales ( in the long run )... if they don't push Itanium they risk being caught up and passed. They are taking the chance because they are pushing full steam ahead on UltraSparc IV and UltraSparc V. From discussions in comp.arch UltraSparc V looks to be an SMT processor just like EV8 but whereas EV8 supports 4 separate threads US V will support 2. I suspect that senior engineering staff at both organizations were instrumental in high-end choices. In Sun's case , they are more at risk than Compaq as Alpha appears to have a great deal of headroom looking at EV6, EV7 , EV8 , EV9 (EV9 supposedly has 8 threads but it is too early to tell if that is fact or fable). Would be quite the blow if Itanium "lost" another OS. But I am sure the Intel spin doctors will make the most of it. Let's see.. Monterey check, (yeah , see them moving a LOT of that .. NOT!). Linux check, (best shot, but probably better off buying cheaper and faster IA32 servers). HP/UX check (ouch.. this one goes no where initially, PA-8600 quite a bit faster than Itanium). Solaris bzzzt, W2K-64 bzzzt (maybe next year)... Rob