Posts by POWERFAN

IBM embraces - wtf - Sun's Solaris across x86 server line

AIX? - #1 in Unix marketshare

To answer the question about "where does this leave AIX?" If you look at IDC or Gartner marketshare you will see that AIX is the only growth Unix platform over the last 5 years. AIX +10.4%, Sun -1.4%, HP -5.3% in marketshare. POWER is IBM's growth engine for HW, SW and services. Solaris support is about choice. IBM in 1993 embraced open and choice and this is another example of that commitment.

Sun is finally learning that in order to get above $5 a share they need to partner vs. pretend they have the best solution with only Sun products.

Sun releases world's fastest chip - at 1.4GHz

Niagara II is still a light thread niche unscalable chip

Niagara is good for light threads only. If you have any heavy threads with your web services applications it will slow to a crawl.

It still has 8 Keep It Simple (aka minimal function) cores, so now having 8 threads vs. 4 sharing one core exasperates the inability to handle heavy threads. P6 scales past NigaraII 6X on SPECint and 7X SPECfp.

The real got ya is the inability to scale and do virtualization beyond one chip. Sun's Hypervisor is very rudimentary by only assigning threads to an OS vs. priorities/mins/maxs/entitlements...etc. It takes more than one chip or a simple SPEC benchmark to get past niche.

The only time it looks like a fast chip is read only workload or if you are comparing against the end of life SPARCIV. If Sun actually cares about the environment maybe they should stop forcing customers to buy 32GB so they can get more revenue/profit.

Intel's 'Montvale' half the chip it used to be

Beware of 18MB cache Itanium chips

HP is dumping defective chips on unsuspecting customers. Defective Itanic chips are being sold with 25% of the cache disabled at firesale prices.

HP steals agenda setting crown from IBM

HP is the leader in ink not IT

HP's Business Critical Systems division continues to drop in revenue every quarter. If you take ink out of the revenue number they are a small IT company. Ink is five times the size of BCS and nine times the size of Integrity revenue. HP's got such a cash cow with ink it can actually charge for black ink twice the price of human blood. http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/peripherals/hp-ink-costs-more-than-human-blood-booze-212444.php