RE:Kebabbert
I have never said that Nobody would buy SPARC because of too high a price, sure customers will, buy SUN servers.
But things aren't really looking that good.
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/investor/earnings_releases/Q409_SLD.pdf
SUN sold 6530 MUSD worth of servers in 2008
SUN sold 4657 MUSD worth of servers in 2009
that is a drop of 29%
And before you start to dissect the numbers and say "Yes but CMT is doing well", notice the other system product category :)= Moving revenue around in your financial statements is nothing new. And from what we hear it isn't like things are getting bright for SUN (no pun intended).
Do I think that current SPARC Servers are to expensive ?
Yes, in the M series you simply get less bang for the buck compared to for example power.
The CMT series are not well suited for many workloads IMHO, and I think they are over hyped.
Sure the band new T5440 with 32 T2+ Cores will outperform a Power 570 with 16 cores, on for example specJBB2005, nothing much to say there there are benchmarks to show it.
http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/overview/performance.jsp
But there are some things you should keep in mind here.
1) The Power 570 that SUN are comparing with is more than 2 years old, note that there was a benchmark out on the 5.0GHz version and the 32 core version of the power 570 which both beat the T5440 score. A little cherry picking is always nice
2) This is on a workload that is very well suited for the T5440, lots of threads and embarrassingly parallel. The T5440 uses 32 JVM instances versus 8 for the power 570. The T5xxx'es are good for benchmarks, but in the real world where single threaded performance is a key factor, things do look different.
3) I don't really know if it is fair to compare a high RAS system like the power 570 with an entry level box like the T5440. I mean you can't even hotswap PCI slots on a T5440. It is more suited to compare against the DL585 which is also mentioned on the page.
4) And funny enough the machine that is in the same league, with regards to RAS, as the T5440, the DL585 they don't really mention. But Ok it's also only 6 times cheaper, than the T5440, and faster.
It's not that I think the fact that SPARC is doing badly is a good thing, we need competition. But Snoracle needs shut up with their marketing bull, and start to ship some better products.
I mean, in Q1 2010 POWER boxes will start to ship with POWER7. That means that the CMT advantage with 8 cores per chip is gone. And from what I understand POWER7 will be packing a heavy punch, with 8 cores each with better per core throughput than power6.
This basically means that a 4 socket T5440 will be competing against a 2 Socket POWER7 box, and on some benchmark, like SAP, get the living crap beat out of it by a 2 socket power7 box.
And how do you think a M9000, that today barely can beat a 64 core power 595, will fare against a a 256 Core power 595 ?
Specially seen in the light that the next 3 years the only upgrades to the M9000 is minor speed bumps.
Lets hope Snoracle gets their act together, but I seriously doubt that they will.
// Jesper