Star Sun Plans On-Chip Security Boost for UltraSPARC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 26th Aug 2009 18:08 UTC
SUN Microsystems "Sun Microsystems' product plans are up in the air pending its acquisition by Oracle, but the company's chip engineers continue to present new designs in the hope they'll see the light of day. At the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University on Tuesday, Sun presented plans for a security accelerator chip that it said would reduce encryption costs for applications such as VoIP calls and online banking Web sites. The chip, known as a coprocessor, will be included on the same silicon as Rainbow Falls, the code name for the follow-on to Sun's multithreaded Ultrasparc T2 processor."
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RE[5]: Again and again...
by jwwf on Thu 27th Aug 2009 14:13 UTC in reply to "RE[4]: Again and again..."
jwwf
Member since:
2006-01-19

The research, development and production costs versus the potential returns on this seem more and more non-sensical the more you think about it.


Looking at the presentation at http://blogs.sun.com/sprack/resource/hotChips_spracklen-final.pdf it seems to be an incremental development on what they've been doing for the last 5 years or so. In proportion the costs might not have been that bad.

Regardless, I am in favor of this kind of thing (diversity in systems) for the simple reason that if everybody just sits back and says "x86 and Windows / Linux kicks everything's butt, why bother" then we accept that the state of computing in 2009 is the best of all possible worlds and set in stone from now on. I find that hard to accept. I like cheap x86 as much as the next guy, but I don't like a monoculture. What if AMD dies? Anybody want to go back to $1000 P3s in desktops, like 10 years ago? I don't think it's that far-fetched.

"I don't see how this is any different than a UNIX vendor back in the day bundling a volume manager.

You've hit the nail on the head with that statement. It's rather like what a Unix vendor would do about fifteen years ago to justify the cost of their own hardware and software. "

Definitely a double meaning there ;) . But I'd argue that having it bundled adds value beyond the cost of the third party license you save. The reduction in complexity and support finger pointing is worth something.

Anyway you have some valid points. But if Sun fails and systems innovation slows down proportionally, I think it's a net loss for computing; at best it's not going to make x86 any cheaper!

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