Sun Microsystems may have dropped a bit of weight by the time Oracle officially acquires the company. According to two people briefed on Sun's plans, the company has cancelled its Rock chip project, putting an end to one of its biggest revitalization bets. Sun has been working on the Rock project for more than five years, hoping to create a chip with many cores that would trounce competing server chips from IBM. and Intel. The company has talked about Rock in the loftiest of terms and built it up as a game-changing product. In April 2007, Jonathan Schwartz, the chief executive of Sun, bragged about receiving the first test versions of Rock. But the two people familiar with Sun's plans say Rock has met with an unceremonious end. The people requested anonymity, as they are not authorized to speak with the press about Sun's plans. Michelle Parkinson, a Sun spokeswoman, said the company had no comment.
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Member since:2007-05-28
What a minute, that's stepping way over the line. The last century of computing models have been a failure? The unparalleled progression has changed our lives more than anything in the history of mankind. If you stepped back to 1909 you would see a completely different world and a LOT more manual tasks that we all take for granted today.
Member since:2006-05-09
The context of my comment is the parallel programming crisis. The Turing Computing Model is no help in finding a solution and is, in fact, the cause of the crisis. Sounds like failure to me.
Anyway, this is just my opinion. So don't let it bother you too much.
Member since:2005-07-06
You're looking way too much into this; Sun has two processors, they have the traditional multi-core processor from Fujitsu and their own multi-core monster. I'd say that on purchase of sun, when looking at the continued development of the custom Sun multi-core processor and compared it to what Fujitsu is doing - there is little to justify continuing it.
SPARC will continue to be developed - and you might see Oracle purchase in the future the Fujitsu SPARC assets. Don't expect pie in the sky bet the whole farm ideas coming forward; they'll take conservative with future development but when things do improve they'll be realistic enhancements and not ideas born out of 'in theory', 'on paper' and 'in the lab' that fuelled much of T1/T2 and Rock's development.
Member since:
2006-05-09
Rest assured that Sun's Rock is not the last big chip failure for the industry. Get ready to witness Intel's Larrabee and AMD's Fusion projects come crashing down like so many Hindenburgs.
Anybody who thinks that last century’s multithreading CPU and GPU technologies will survive in the age of massive parallelism is delusional, in my opinion. When the pain becomes unbearable (it's all about money), it will suddenly dawn on everybody in the industry that it is finally time to force the baby boomers (the Turing Machine worhsippers) into retirement so that we can boldly break away from the flawed and failed computing models of the last century.
Sun blew it but it's not too late. Oracle should let bygones be bygones and immediately fund another big chip project, one designed to truly rock the industry this time around and ruffle as many feathers as possible. That is, if they know what's good for them. It would be a shame to let all that engineering talent migrate elsewhere.
How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis:
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2008/07/how-to-solve-parallel-prog...
Edited 2009-06-16 22:55 UTC