It's only a matter of time before Sun Microsystems starts helping AMD enhance the Opteron chip, at least according to Sun. David Yen, executive vice president of the scalable systems group at Sun, said that the collaboration between the two will lead to cooperative efforts on AMD's flagship processor.
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For most of us, it's been obvious for quite some time that Sun just havent got the necessary resources to make quality hardware.
Sun makes very high quality hardware, it's just not always as fast as others. Speed != quality. My old ultra 10 is still running while the same can't be said of my p2 system
Everything Sun starts "assisting" in goes downhill.
Look at StarOffice
What it became openoffice and is the only real free competitor to ms office? Your own example refutes your point.
I think Sun will be just fine. They have direction (finally), beautifull software, overprised but reliable hardware, and even open sourced their OS. To top it off if the OSDL isn't 'free' enough for you, they'll put linux on their harware for you (perhaps reluctantly but would you trust a vendor that doesn't prefer their own?)
Jared.
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Sun actually has quite a lot of competence in chip design, it is just that they have bet on a lot of wrong horses as of late. Notable is for example one of the lead Alpha designers who did design on the UltraSPARC IV which ended up being cancelled (probably since Sun is going Opteron and the PrimePower SPARC from Fujitsu for the next iteration), this is interesting since so much of the rest of the Alpha team found their way to AMD.
With some general design sanity brought in by AMD this could be a very good thing, Sun has a lot of general design competence, but especially in paralell processing and fault tolerance.
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2005-07-06
Sun depends on AMD/Opteron. And doesn't like Intel.
Intel has a major offensive in the works and if AMD folds, Sun is screwed.
Sun is worried due to Intel's ability to use its monopoly power and basically give chips away to bury AMD.
So Sun will do anything it can to help AMD.
Technically, Sun's experience in crossbar architectures will be of help to AMD. We may also see collaboration on the floating point side to put a dent in Itanium.
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2005-07-06
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Sun micro should buy AMD and operate it as a subsidary. Start making motherboards and sell to OEMs and system builders instead of low end packaged servers... Sell the big bad servers and provide the equipment to system builders, thus opening its market insanely huge. they could get the chip builder cheap.
sadly, i doubt sun is that smart.
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i do believe they can afford it, i think their cash pile might have dropped bellow AMD's worth but I'm positive there are other options which will allow it to but i do not think sun's management is smart enough(going to take that risk)...
why go for volume entry level servers and then diss entry level volume pc businesses??? they have the capability to provide to OEMs but McNeely opposses it--he even went on stage several times and suggested its better to buy the car rather than the parts. rather a dumb comparrison.
Member since:2005-07-06
And how are do you suppose they get this extra cash? they must generate enough cash not only to cover the cost if they, for example, issued bonds to fund the venture, they must also create enough cash to cover the risks associated with the transaction.
With that, how many of the companies will continue to purchase Opteron chips afterwards? how many of the fabs that current produce Opteron chips will be willing to continue to produce them (directing that at IBM) etc. etc.
The issue is alot more complex than just purchasing a company outright, and everything working fabulously from there.
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There's been an article on the Inquirer 2 days ago about Intel planning to create (yet another) instruction set extension to help software developers writing faster virtual machines for Java and .Net:
http://www.theinquirer.net/index.html?article=24781
The article states that AMD has nothing (yet) to compete with that, of course it would be pretty embarrassing if Intel came out with that and Sun didn't offer any x86 servers with Java acceleration because they want to stick to the Opteron. So it would make an awful lot of sense for Sun to help AMD there.
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Sorry, I got confused by the comment preview not autoparsing URLs, so I fiddled with the URL and in the end submitted a non-working one (silly me). Here is the correct URL:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=24781
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considering that sun micro buys more server chips from AMD than any other company on the planet makes sense since sun also develops very very good processors.
Oh and, AMD's financials aren't doing too hot. cooperation between the two will help cut costs dramaticly. I think if sun and amd both joined forces, yet kept companies seperate it might be better...
I dont think they should buy it anymore, but buy a big stake in the company.. a controlling amount. If AMD made computers and sold them then OEMs would feel like they are aiding the enemy, therefore its a bad idea.
