Re: investment protection
Weeehh... easy... you sure have been drinking the Oracle Cool aid.
Sure for example going from POWER 595 -> POWER 795 is a major overhaul, and requires that you move the workload off the machine, which doesn't require downtime, if you exploit powervm. Again live partition mobility is something that is BAU on POWER. But again you still save a shitload of money on upgrading rather than forklifting.
And I must admit that I can hardly see it's a problem that I can choose lower clocked processors for a cheaper price as a problem, or chips with fewer cores but much higher frequency for optimizing cost on expensive software. Like Oracle's for example.
No sure lets throw money after extra software licenses, that give no business value what so ever.
Again if I buy a POWER 770 with 48 cores running at 4.42GHz I'll get roughly the same throughput as a POWER 779 with 64 cores running at 3.3 GHz. Now if I run something like an EE Oracle DB with some addon's that little move will basically pay for the Server over 4-5 years.
So being able to tailor your server depending on workload is.. well.. surely a bad thing.
And as for what Fujitsu/Oracle/SUN have been selling, then you if you go back 5-6 years, which is the expected lifetime of a server, then Fujitsu/Oracle/SUN have been selling servers based upon:
UltraSPARC T1, UltraSPARC T2, UltraSPARC T2+,UltraSPARC T3,UltraSPARC T4, SPARC64 V+,SPARC64 VI,SPARC64 VII,SPARC64 VII+,SPARC64 X, UltraSPARC IV, UltraSPARC IV+,UltraSPARC IIIi and UltraSPARC-III Cu.
Sure they are binary compatible, but ... tuning wise and planning wise and and and .. the servers are very different. This is why we have had a jungle of different SPARC systems, with very few models being the same, an administrative nightmare.
As for the performance of the SPARC64 X in the M10-4S. Then it's funny to see you get all excited over a 1024 core machine that is barely released, being twice as fast as a 3 year old POWER sytem with 25% of the number of cores on an embarrassingly parallel CPU stressing only benchmark.
Lets see how it does on more taxing benchmarks, and lets see what new POWER servers that according to TPM is just around the corner.
Again take deep breath and try to look at reality.
Now when that is said, the M10-4S looks like a great server.
// Jesper