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

To: QwikSand who wrote (63533)	12/10/2005 9:23:53 PM
From: shlurker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

In my opinion (i was a systems programmer pre 1980 when there were very few operating systems, and you had to write your own), SUNW's approach is a much simpler solution for servers of a particular kind. Intra thread parallelism is arbitrarily complex, because it depends on what the thread is doing - the semantics of the thread. The compiler has to essentially understand the thread. ("is there a branch ahead in this code? is it important?") Concurrent threads do not interfere with each other. There is a regular 'flow' in this environment. Each thread will process thru without interacting with the others, except of course when competing for system resources; and that competition is independent of the semantics of any one thread. This means no compiler changes, a HUGE simplification, for example. If you have, say, a single complex problem that must be 'parallelized' Niagra will likely do worse than say Itanium. You need intra thread parallelism here. Maybe you can't to the weather models on Niagra. But what about Amazon, Google or Ebay type servers? The threads(transactions) are already 'parallelized'! Seems like the market for this kind of server is bigger, especially if with Niagra they can deliver on the low-power issue! I sold all my SUNW shares years ago (a stop-limit order at $17 saved me at the time!) but I bought them back last week at $3.91. I'm placing my SUNW bets solely on the Niagra design and aim.