Sun Microsystems has launched a new business unit to sell its Sparc processors, a return to an idea it had dropped years ago. David Yen, currently executive vice president of storage but previously in charge of Sun's Sparc work, will lead the new group and retain his executive VP status, the company said Thursday.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-02-15
It costs somewhere between 300 and 500 million dollars to do the R&D for a new processor, if you want to stay competitive with Intel.
Intel can afford this because they tend to sell 100s of millions of each new chip so the cost the R&D adds to the part is 3 or 4 dollars.
Sun can't afford to do it because even if they're doing 1/10 of Intel's market share, they have to add 30 or 40 dollars to the price of a chip.
The exact numbers were different 10 years ago when HP got out of the processor business and sold the wide word architecture to Intel as a basis for Itanic, but at that time HP was the #2 computer maker in the world and couldn't make money competing against Intel.
Sun's a much smaller company and has an even worse position with respect to competing with Intel. They're about where Intergraph was in '89, except that unlike Intergraph, they don't have the option of dropping their own processor and going to using Intel, er, wait, they've already started doing that. . .
Sun's dead Jim.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-01-19
Sun can't afford to do it because even if they're doing 1/10 of Intel's market share, they have to add 30 or 40 dollars to the price of a chip.
A V890 on the Sun store with 16 cores and 128 GB is over $200K. Do you really think that adding even $1000 to each chip makes a significant difference here?
The thing you do not seem to get is that Sun is not competing with Intel. They are competing with HP and IBM , whose non-x86 prices are similar and quite likely worse.
A HP Integrity 16 core / 128 GB box with top-end Itaniums is easily over $200K, but the dual core Itaniums themselves list (from Intel) at maybe $4K each. HP, of course, charges a lot more than that for each CPU (so much for the benefits of an "industry standard CPU" - last I checked, the price vs PA-RISC was about the same) , but the point is, what does Intel get here, 10, maybe 15 percent of the sale?
Its the system sale that is important.
Besides, if CPU speed was what kept a server company afloat, Alpha would still be here, and Sun would have died 10 years ago.
Member since:2007-02-06
Sun's a much smaller company and has an even worse position with respect to competing with Intel. They're about where Intergraph was in '89, except that unlike Intergraph, they don't have the option of dropping their own processor and going to using Intel, er, wait, they've already started doing that. . .
I don't see how the two compare. Intergraph core business was in the workstation market, not servers and they never designed their own processor line completely in-house. The Clipper processors they used at the time were developed by Fairchild and then the line was bought by Intergraph. The only 100% in-house design they had (the C5) was ultimately axed. On top of that I don't see why Sun couldn't transition to Intel processors. Their newly reborn x86 business is doing very well and suggests the contrary. Their success there was also quite surprising as they entered that very crowded market very late.
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight.""And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.
Member since:
2005-11-05
SPARC's dead
Please enlighten me as to why Sparc is dead?