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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: QwikSand who wrote (41099)	2/9/2001 7:45:34 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

QS - Compaq's "Wildfire" program was initiated in 1994 by DEC to define a switch-fabric computer to supercede traditional SMP designs, and included the switch, memory, I/O and processor components to make that work. So they had a little lead on your 3 years. Not only that, but I know a number of semiconductor design people from Sun who were very interested in the early Wildfire thinking and followed it pretty closely. Most of that architectural design was done at the research center in Palo Alto and the tech community there is pretty incestuous. That was all going on when I lived in the bay area. BTW I used to do a lot of semiconductor design back when I worked for a living, and before the corrupting force of software design took me totally over to the dark side, and so I rubbed shoulders with a lot of those folks. So the "wildfire project" was fairly well known in that community, at least in the general sense that it was a ground-breaking effort to do a new architecture, more than 5 years ago. There is certainly no reason why Sun can not use the name. But it is surprising - kind of like them calling the next version of Solaris "whistler" or something like that.

To: QwikSand who wrote (41099)	2/9/2001 10:22:49 AM
From: Tony Viola	Respond to of 64865

The "wildfire" name has been used as a code name by Sun for AT LEAST 3 years and possibly longer. Starfire is very familiar as a Sun codename, but I don't think many think of Sun when they hear Wildfire. --TV

To: QwikSand who wrote (41099)	2/9/2001 8:16:03 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

QS - well, SOMEBODY was not paying attention - but there is no Sun product named "wildfire" that I can find - a search of Sun's site turned up a reference to a Brazilian forest wildfire, and a speech recognition algorithm called wildfire which runs only on NT (and was therefore trashed in the Sun commentary) but no products. So I stand by my original position which is that the poster was confused. As Tony suggests, he probably meant "Starfire". Or maybe JC is right and SHE named wildfire.