Posts by wmesard 9 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jan 2010
> Any Sunshiners out there still trying to pretend that single-threaded performance and cache don't matter?
No one ever said it didn't matter. The problem is that Sun missed two generations of single-threaded processors (Millennium and Rock). Sun would be an independent, profitable company today if it had taken a 10th of the money wasted on those projects and invested it in the evolution of UltraSPARC-IV+.
HPC at Sun drove technology in the wrong direction. Wildcat diverted million of dollars and who-knows how many man-hours. HPC requirements added to the cost and delay of UltraSPARC-III and Starcat/Serengeti. HPC complexity helped make Millennium unbuildable.
If HPC innovations trickled down to products that actually...y'know...generate revenue, that would be one thing. But historically, that has not been the case. One of the things that killed Sun was a this tolerance for staring at shiny objects, instead of watching the bottom line.
Leave HPC to the spooks and the grad students.
"[Y]ou'll be relieved to know that Oracle at least said it will invest in Sparc and x64 servers, storage, operating systems, and other technologies. That's something that Sun itself has not done in a very long time."
Huh? Sun invested billions in Millennium, Rock and other projects. Just because those projects were ill-advised--and then on top of that suffered due to spectacularly poor execution--doesn't mean the money wasn't invested.
Even after this lost decade, Sun still has some of the best engineering talent in the business. Maybe the Oracle boys will finally do what the old regime couldn't or wouldn't: finally put a stop to the infighting, the self-delusional project management, and the perpetual research project atmosphere.
I'm glad to see Fowler at the helm. But he's still got a long row to hoe.
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