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Yes. The phenomenon of trying to push yourself into a niche selling point because of other difficulties you have where there are already existing and established players makes life very, very difficult.


SPARC is a niche market, so it's hardly going to attract more people to using SPARC which is what Sun need. However, I'd like to see some figures from Sun as to how much business they expect to gain by targetting existing SPARC users who know they need SSL accelerators and already have them installed. It's easier just to get yourself more powerful hardware if you want to cut costs and can get away with it.

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


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. Unfortunately, with the proliferation of cheap and powerful commodity x86 hardware, cheap storage and freely available storage management subsystems like LVM, software RAID and ZFS, as well as very general purpose storage like Amazon's S3, that strategy has ultimately become a totally fruitless exercise that has put many big Unix vendors out of business.


When you're using it as a strategy to try and sell a declining platform the opportunities for success are pretty limited. Sun have always had some very strange ideas about what it is that they're trying to commoditise. More powerful x86 hardware and cost reasons have already relegated coprocessors and on-chip processing of specific protocols to a niche market themselves. Trying to compete in an already niche market is doomed to failure.


Possibly, but graphics is a large and expanding field in itself with ever expanding requirements that has some way to run yet. You might get total onboard and on-chip graphics at some point in the future, but that is some way off. SSL and encryption/decryption acceleration is certainly not like that so the comparison is rather flawed.

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.


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!