Erstwhile bitter rivals Dell and Sun Microsystems are set to announce that Sun's Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems will be supported in all of Dell's servers. Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell and Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz plan to make the announcement during a joint appearance at the Oracle OpenWorld 2007 conference today.
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Member since:2007-07-04
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
what do you mean sparc i going nowhere?! Have you used a T1? They are incredibly powerful! Or do you mean sparc is going nowhere in the direction you happen to use it (desktop x86 based systems?)
I hope sparc and the power chips keep getting developed. In my eyes there is no point fighting out of a software lockin to just to enter a hardware one...
Member since:2006-03-15
"what do you mean sparc i going nowhere?! Have you used a T1? They are incredibly powerful! Or do you mean sparc is going nowhere in the direction you happen to use it (desktop x86 based systems?) "
I think he means that SPARC is not being phased out, that it is going to still be around, and that you can still purchase it from Sun.
Member since:2005-07-23
Member since:2005-07-08
Sun faces some serious challenges on the SPARC side of its business, especially in terms of performance per thread. I don't think it's feasible in the long-run for Sun to compete with AMD and Intel for serialized workloads. Sun's greatest hardware strength from its up-market pedigree is in system architecture, whereas it never moved the volume required to excel in the modern processor market.
I agree that Sun looks very strong at the moment in thread-dense boxes for transaction computing. However, both Intel and AMD have mini-cores coming in 2009-10 that will scale down to ultra-mobile and tile up to massively-multithreaded rack servers that will compete with Sun's Niagara/Rock descendants. On the other hand, I could definitely see Sun as the leading OEM for these Intel/AMD-based thread monsters.
I don't understand. There are very few operating systems and applications that don't run on x86, and plenty of them run on SPARC and POWER as well. There's no lock-in. The proprietary software vendors that ignore SPARC and POWER do so because the niche markets aren't worth their time and resources, not because of any especially onerous barriers to cross-architecture compatibility.
Member since:
2005-07-06
No, Sun has been expanding their OEM program for the last couple of years. The sparc hardware isn't going anywhere, this is just another option for those considering Solaris.