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Sun Microsystems Technology Hardware

Sun & Fujitsu Team On SPARC Chips & System 121

Posted by timothy from the abstraction-to-abstraction dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Sun and Fujitsu just announced a 20-year partnership to jointly develop SPARC based technology and systems. It looks like the long-predicted partnership that was hinted at earlier has finally come to pass in a much more comprehensive manner than I've heard anyone predict, i.e. not just chips, but a unified range of systems. My guess: Sun drops Ultrasparc III to provide the Throughput computing chips for the low end / web / network stuff, and takes up the Fujitsu provided SPARC64 chips for the high end and workstation market. Will this spark a new RISC renaissance for Sun and Fujitsu? Or is it a last gasp before Opteron / PowerPC / Itanium crush them? I for one will be interested to see what systems and processors come out of this. This could really revitalize the SPARC system market, especially if Sun's work on Throughput computing proves out."
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Sun & Fujitsu Team On SPARC Chips & System More

Sun & Fujitsu Team On SPARC Chips & System

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  • 20 years? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Motherfucking Shit ( 636021 )

    Sun and Fujitsu just announced a 20-year partnership..

    I'm sorry, but a 20-year partnership is not only aggressively optimistic, it's just downright insane. Look at what's changed in the computing world over the past 20 years. Microsoft appeared, Apple came and went and came again, Linux emerged and gained ground. Things change fast in the world of Moore's law.

    Will Sun be here 20 years from now? Will Fujitsu? If I were a betting man, I'd gamble on the latter more than the former.

    This is an interesting deal

    • Re:20 years? (Score:5, Informative)

      by syphoon ( 619506 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @06:41AM (#9313053)
      You were misled by the OP, but RTFA please. The press release said they're expanding their relationship that's already existed for 20 years. Not that they're announcing a 20 year partnership.

      • Re:20 years? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Ratbert42 ( 452340 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:03AM (#9313112)
        NEW YORK, NY -- July 8, 1987 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc., introduced today the Sun-4 family of 10-MIPS supercomputing workstations and servers that give users the performance of a VAX 8800 system at one-tenth the price.
        ...
        Sun also announced that it will license the new SPARC architecture... SPARC licensees announced today are Fujitsu Microelectronics, Cypress Semiconductor, and Bipolar Integrated Technology.
        ...

      • Re:20 years? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:20AM (#9313366) Journal
        And its not going good.

        The reason Sun is losing is because the SparcV should be out that is comptetive agaisnt (theoritical) agaisnt the power, mips, and Opteron.

        TI who actually fabricates teh chips is pulling a Motorolla in order to gain more profits by not upgrading their plants.

        Either they innovate and skip the sparcIV and leep to the sparcV and develop the sparcVI or give in to Opteron now and save the company.

        • Re:20 years? (Score:3, Interesting)

          by christophersaul ( 127003 )
          Why 'give in' to Opteron? It fits in well with the Sparc kit and Sun are already aggressively marketing Opteron.

          Sun are capable of having a strategy that can move with the market, as well as dictating to the market, as appropriate. I get tired of people on Slashdot claiming one company or product is 'dead' just because it has a competitor.

          Sun also aren't particularly 'losing', as you put it. Unit shipments were up 26% for the first quarter of 2004, with the UIIIi systems selling extremely well - and th
          • thank you! people saying that the Opteron is going to crush Sun is almost as dumb as people saying the Celeron is going to crush Dell.

            Sun's current Opteron lineup is *very* impressive and their roadmap is even more impressive. They compare extremely favorably with Dell server offerings, and Dell is their main competitor in this arena IMHO.

            It's a good time to be a consumer because Dell makes very nice and inexpesive cabinets that you can fill with your new Sun gear =)
            • Opteron can have some impact on Sun as it changes Sun's image a bit. Wether this is a positive or negative change depends on your point of view. Personally, I see that Sun is looking to provide more economical hardware for the small to medium sized organizations while providing a clear road map should they need to scale up. On the other hand, people who already have a negative opinion of Sun will see the Opteron agreement as Sun giving up on their own chip. The chips can have a perceived affect on Sun w
          • If anything they should have bought AMD when they signed the partnership.
          • The sparcV was due last year and they are still using the sparcIII??

            Yes sun is losing. The only advantage the sparcIII has it that its threading and context switching is done in hardware.

            Sales are picking up finally after the recession to slowly upgrade old equipment but Dell, HP, and IBM all have shipments much higher then Sun's.

            They are losing the market in the high end because their products are not fast enough for the large scale work needed. They have the i/o yes but all of Sun's competitors sell si
            • Not true. Sun's UNIX business is larger then HP and IBM's combined. Unit shipments of first quarter 2004 up by 26+, more than any other Unix vendor.

              Chips are always late - which version of Power x Itanium were we supposed to have now?

              Sun are also simply not losing the market in the high end. IBM's performance looks great when you read all those TPC/C benchmark results which don't translate to any kind of real world performance, in addition to which UIV is showing up to double the performance on key app
      • You seem to have been equally misled by TFA, as Fujitsu were founded in 1985. They could not have had a partnership with anyone twenty years ago. Sun, on the other hand, formed in 1982 so it's feasible that they did. But it wasn't any Fuji rep that Bechtolstein, McNealy, Joy and Khosla shook hands with, if they did.

        • Re:20 years? (Score:4, Informative)

          by Dj ( 224 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:48AM (#9313528) Homepage
          And you seem to not do your research.

          http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Fujitsu [wordiq.com]

          The company was established in 1935 under the name Fuji Tsshinki Seiz, a spinoff of the Fuji Electric company, this in turn being a joint venture between the Furukawa mining company and German conglomerate Siemens.

          Or how about more obviously....

          http://pr.fujitsu.com/en/profile/profile.html [fujitsu.com]

          Fujitsu is a leading provider of customer-focused information technology and communications solutions for the global marketplace. Since Fujitsu's establishment in 1935, we have maintained a commitment to cutting-edge technological innovation and uncompromising product quality.

          So only 50 years out there old chap. :)

          • Or 1985 [computerhope.com]. The problem with the web rears its ugly head once more.
            • But thats only Fujitsu ICL's creation.
              ICL was created from the UK computer pioneers (Lyons - with LEO, etc).
              They dropped the ICL name about 10 years after the "merger" with Fujitsu.
              They sold stuff as Fujitsu Siemens for a while too - dunno if they still do.

              Fujitsu have been a long time user/developer of Sparc stuff.

  • that's why... (Score:5, Funny)

    by hutkey ( 709330 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @06:31AM (#9313028)
    ...Japan is called "Land of the rising Sun"

    • Here's some more inside information (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      First, check out my previous article [slashdot.org]. I must write anonymously because I currently work in the server division.

      To put the matter simply, what killed Sun Microsystems is a pathetic engineering team in the microprocessor division. With the exception of the UltraSPARC I and II, all the other processors were poorly designed and managed. What is unique about Sun's microprocessor division is that the managers consistently and actively hired H-1B workers from Taiwan and India. Foreign engineers were the rule

  • Wonder how this fits into the free hardware (Score:5, Funny)

    by uberkuba ( 554839 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @06:32AM (#9313034)
    Hehehe... hope they know that Sun wants to give their hardware away.

  • Throughput computing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by shoppa ( 464619 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @06:33AM (#9313037)
    I always thought Sun's only realistic market for "Throughput computing" (maximizing ops/watt) was dense server farms (e.g. blades). Now it is true that this market is playing out quite like everyone (especially Sun) wanted it to, but it is a real market.

    For thin-client stuff, while low power consumption is a priority, it's not a big enough one to warrant the amount of money that Sun and others have spent on it. Maybe, just maybe, as a spinoff.

    These "find a market for our new processor" discussions are getting a little depressing. I remember being excited about the DEC Alpha for embedded applications, but since then it all feels hollow.

    • other market (Score:4, Informative)

      by millahtime ( 710421 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:53AM (#9313262) Homepage Journal
      They have another market in high end engineering desktops. For people who design chips and other detailed components and need to simulate them there is still a market for their work stations.

      Now, the other chips are catching quick on this so they need to stay ahead or they could loose that market too.

      • Re:other market (Score:3, Informative)

        by afidel ( 530433 )
        They already lost that market. I know quite a few engineers that two years ago couldn't wait for the Opteron to ship so that they could get a cheap fast system to do design work on. They absolutly HAD to have 64bit support as their chip routing would often take 8-12GB of RAM to run in a single process but they were tired of paying SUN prices. When you can get a dual Opteron system with 16GB for less than the 16GB RAM upgrade from SUN you can see why they have lost the market.

  • What's actually going on here... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @06:34AM (#9313038)
    1) Sun is having troubles convincing its partners that its multi-core "throughput computing" chip will be competitive. That Gartner report is causing people to ask questions about whether Sun can deliver on its promises. And who wants a 500Mhz 16 core chip anyway? Think of the memory bandwidth problems!

    2) Fujitsu Sparc core spanks Suns own core.

    My prediction? Sun will abandon its multi-core, asynchronous research pipedreams and farm out all CPU design to Fujitsu. CPU design is a very costly (comoditised) business for Sun to be in, and as Apple have shown its the system that matters, not the processor.

    • And what do you think, Sun will concentrate on? The software? ... not a big deal in such a partnership for fujitsu then ...

    • Re:What's actually going on here... (Score:5, Funny)

      by turgid ( 580780 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @06:53AM (#9313080) Journal
      And who wants a 500Mhz 16 core chip anyway? Think of the memory bandwidth problems!

      Who wants a single (or dual) core 5GHz chip anyway? Think of the memory bandwidth problems.

      • Well, there are other issues like lock contentions (making sure 2 CPUs aren't using the same chunk of RAM) but the point is correct. The problem with 16 500MHz cores is that a single threaded app will still run at the same speed as a single 500MHz core; you would be able to run more of them at the same time on the 16 cores, though.

        • Re:What's actually going on here... (Score:5, Informative)

          by turgid ( 580780 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:09AM (#9313128) Journal
          You run Solaris on SPARC processors. Solaris is highly multi-threaded from the ground up. It's extremely fine-grained. It also has some sophisticated algorithms for migrating threads to the most appropriate processor based on things like memory locality and load. (Forgive me if my terminology isn't terribly accurate, I'm not an OS kernel expert). The Niagra and ROCK processors are designed to execute highly multithreaded loads. Fujitsu SPARC64 is more traditional, in that it is designed for loads with fewer concurrent threads. By adopting Fujitsu's high-end gear, Sun gets performance on less thread-intesive loads too. Now Sun and Fujitsu have a horse for every course, so to speak. If I were HP trying to sell itanic boxes, and cranky old (soon to be exterminated) PA-RISC kit, I'd be very worried.

          • Re:What's actually going on here... (Score:1, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward
            >If I were HP trying to sell itanic boxes, and
            >cranky old (soon to be exterminated) PA-RISC
            >kit, I'd be very worried.

            I'm sorry, based on what you posted, you seem
            to know something of Sparc hardware and
            software, but even if what you say is true,
            it's still just another crack pipe dream.

            Why? Because business want platforms that
            a) Aren't expensive
            b) Can run their software today

            There really aren't that many apps written
            today that have a mandatory need for
            "some sophisticated algorithms for migrating
            • Apache runs just fine on commodity hardware.

              So it does. There's more to life than apache though.

              I dare you to look at this [sun.com]. Then, think for a minute about what sort of things you'd use it for.

            • Re:What's actually going on here... (Score:4, Interesting)

              by FatherOfONe ( 515801 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:17AM (#9313355)
              Oracle would absolutely take advantage of this. Any multi-threaded app would. Like say most of the mid-tier app servers. So in some cases it would be possible to have your database, app-server and web server on one box. Granted that box could be setup with different partitions, (similar to vmware in the low cost world, or perhaps user mode linux).

              • Say maybe like Solaris Zones [sun.com] due for release on Solaris 10 later this year?

                From the article:

                The Solaris Zones feature is based on the same basic concepts as FreeBSD Jails. In both FreeBSD Jails and Solaris Zones, each virtual view of the runtime environment is completely segregated, and processes from one environment cannot send signals to or even see processes in another. Both Jails and Zones share only one instance of the operating system, though, so multiple runtime environments can coexist on a mac

                • The real upside of of zones is when combined with N1 Grid. I know it sounds really amorphous, but with zones it really starts to make sense. Imagine rolling out a new zone or dozens when needed across a datacenter full of stock Solaris 10 machines (x86 or SPARC). The storage is on EMC or Hitachi, so you just hand out LUNS like candy for the zone's "/" with predefined pkgs and patches and you have a really dynamic environment for Oracle 10g, webservices, etc.
                  This is the story that needs to be told, but I
    • Yet another self-styled expert seriously lacking in a clue.

      My prediction: Sun will return, stronger than you could possibly imagine.

    • Re:What's actually going on here... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You want 16 cores because servers (especially Sun ones) tend to run many process, with many threads. You want to distribute those threads across multiple CPUs so one doesn't bog down the whole system.

      Regarding memory bandwidth: look at Sun's I/O bus architecture.

    • Re:What's actually going on here... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jschottm ( 317343 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:25AM (#9313186)
      > as Apple have shown its the system that matters, not the processor.

      Yes, but remember, Apple was hurting for quite some time after Motorola stopped working on high end PPC chips. The stagnant G4 hurt Apple - I use encoding software that had started out on Macs but moved the focus of its development to Windows after the the G4 lost steam. The apple version still exists and is supported, but lacks some of the features of the Windows version. And while I've not had a chance to run it on a G5, a dual Athlon MP utterly spanks a dual G4.

      The G5 certainly helps, but it still leaves Apple at the mercy of an outside supplier.
      • Unfortunatly there will probably never be another integrated semi company formed, certainly not one tied to the PC market. Almost everyone (except Intel (and the analog guys) will be using an outside supplier at least some of the time. Not too many companies can afford a $3 billion fab.
    • The word was spreading that the Fujitsu chips and architecture were superior to Sun's, I helped to educate both Fujitsu Marketing consultants, Customers and prospects on the differences and the widening gap. In addition to producing a better set of chips, a considerable amount of mainframe technology was also brought over to FJ Primepower machines, resiliance, reliability features, etc. and I could see in the architecture a hole that is a nice fit for Macrocode (Gene Amdahl's Baby on the Mainframe) that wou

  • Throughput Computing and the Transputer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dnnrly ( 120163 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @06:46AM (#9313066)
    Sun's description of Throughput Computing and their approach of putting multiple processor cores reminds me of what Inmos [inmos.com] tried to do with the Transputer before they became STMicroelectronics [st.com]. The idea was to have many small processors positioned close to each other, communicating between each other closely. I seem to recall seeing transputers on eBay a while back for huge amounts of money. By all accounts, a transputer board was a very useful piece of kit for the right appplications!

  • Will this spark (Score:2, Funny)

    by zBoD ( 86938 )
    > Will this spark

    Ha ha ha, very funny.

  • provide the Throughput computing chips for the low (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    provide the Throughput computing chips for the low end

    It's more likely Sun will start using Opterons for the low-end. Why? Because (IIRC) Opterons scale much better than Intel chips in a multiple-CPU environment. And that multiple-CPU ability to scale damn near linearly is Sun's real strength in the computer market.

    And they want to give that hardware away because they think people are clamoring to pay for the software they put out?!?!!??

  • They announced their partnership? (Score:4, Funny)

    by farmhick ( 465391 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:03AM (#9313111) Homepage
    Did they have to drive from California to Boston for the ceremony?

    And which one wore the dress? ;^)
  • Coincidentally, a Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER HPC2500 server ranked #11 on the last Top500 list. That system uses 2,304 SPARC64 V CPUs running at 1.3GHz, delivering an Rmax (tested maximum performance) of 5406 GFlops and an Rpeak (theoretical maximum performance) of 11980 GFlops. The highest all-Sun system on the list? A 672-CPU Fire 15K cluster, way down at #151. Sun does not build seriously big gear. Fujitsu does. That said, systems using competing processor architectures did finish above that Fujitsu. #10

    • Re:Crush Fujitsu... maybe. (Score:5, Informative)

      by thesupraman ( 179040 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @07:40AM (#9313227)
      Sigh.

      Please try to remember that entry to the 'Top 500' list is as much about your interconnect topology and technology as the capabilities of the processors used.

      It is a measure of one, and exactly one benchmark, LINPACK [top500.org]

      Machines which are not well suited to this benchmark, or do not have network technologies/topologies well matching linpacks requirements will perform poorly at it, but possibly very well for their chosen purpose.

      Good examples of this are the WETA digital clusters used in parts of the LOTR films, which are great for rendering, but hampered seriously in their linpack result by their 100MBit standard ethernet connections.

      Another good example of this is the Virginia Tech G5 cluster, which gets a LARGE boost from it's infiniband interconnects (well, it will when Apple finish giving them the new machines... eventually..).

      Not that I am defending SPARC's rather lackluster performance these days, just making a rather important point.

      Those SPARC boxes better get a LOT cheaper VERY fast if they intend to find any real home in HPC.

      • Machines which are not well suited to this benchmark, or do not have network technologies/topologies well matching linpacks requirements will perform poorly at it, but possibly very well for their chosen purpose.

        In my experience, Sun does a very good job building servers for medium to large scale corporate computing. Rendering farms and supercomputers are not its thing. But if I'm building a database for a typical corporate application, or even a data warehouse, Sun/Oracle are going to be at the top o

  • when yout go the multi-threaded, CMT, etc.. route then Amdahl's law trumps Moore's law.
    • No - That's for individual apps with both paralel and serial parts cos the serial part dominates execution and limits paralelisation. Throughput computing says if you're running a web or app server or OS with many independent threads then they all get to run in paralel. No problem with Amdahl's law - that's a different situation
      • That's only if the threads are completely independent. That's almost never the case. The problem is Amdahl's law has a bit of exponential bite to it. That's why you see all those scalabilty efforts do okay up to 8 or 16 way or so. When they start going to 32 or 64 or greater they start running into trouble. And that's with the highly tuned kernels. Major applications like web servers, databases haven't even started on this. It's only in the discussion stages right now, if at all. I'm supposedly invo
        • For Java, individual JVMs have been seen to run happily with good scaling at 16 CPUs now, and maybe more. For database applications like Oracle and DB2 there have been reports of linear scale at 72 CPUs. So, Amdahl's law (and I met him - he's a great man hardly given the credit due him!) really applies to a particular application or algorithm with both serial and parallel components. As the number of CPUs rises, the serial portion tends to dominate - but that's not relevant for *separate* applications!
        • In the HPC world, 1000 cpu jobs are not that uncommon. Of course, these apps run on nodes having relatively few cpu:s and communicate using message passing, so various OS imposed scalability limits doesn't really affect them.

          Also, the message passing paradigm tends to lead to programs that replicate as much state as practical on each node, so there is usually less time spent waiting on locks compared to typical multithreaded designs.
    • interestingly, Fujitsu used to own a company called Amdahl that actively sold and developed the primepower range of sparc servers.

      it then became FTSI and I think has now been merged into the global Fujitsu empire.

      I considered buying primepower - the 850 and 650 for middle tier J2EE and Oracle databases - certainly they outperformed the Sun vx880 easily and were much cheaper but in the end we didn't go with them because Oracle 9iRAC was not supported in PrimeCluster and went for itanic HP solution instea

  • Cunning writers (Score:1, Funny)

    by dj245 ( 732906 )
    ...and takes up the Fujitsu provided SPARC64 chips for the high end and workstation market. Will this spark a new RISC renaissance for Sun and Fujitsu?...

    Stop it, you're punning me to death. But really though, will the benchmarks from the new systems be fiery or all wet? How heavy are the servers, are they any lighter? And will the chips light your boxes afire or will they be different from the flaming Xeon? Will it be a match for Opteron?

    • A renaissance .... probably not.

      I think Sun are due a bit of credit here. They are in the space of 3-6 months after dropping an architecture they have developed and fathered since the late 80s. Would you abandon your own teenager?

      Management have obviously faced the cold hard truth - the UltraSparc has been solidly beaten. A lot of companies are very slow to pull the plug on something with as a long a history as this, and usually that delay leads to their downfall - Sun, just maybe have caught this before
      • They're not dropping an architecture - the architecture's still the same - Sparc.

        UltraSparc has not been solidly beaten - UIV is out there now and doing well in the market. It's what follows it that will be jointly developed with Fujitsu, which will operate alongside the forthcoming Niagara and Rock multicore CPUs. Hardly a case of abandoing anything.

        The fact that there's another company investing in and developing their own Sparc CPUs validates the whole architecture in the first place.

        I agree with yo

  • Did Sun.... (Score:2, Funny)

    by wpiman ( 739077 )
    happen to mention that their business model includes free hardware? (see yesterdays article)

    That is a slick move- offer free hardware- and then team up with a hardware company to pay for it. Brilliant.

  • Confusing and mixed messages (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @08:46AM (#9313516)
    So yesterday there was the post about hardware being free and today there's news about Sun partnership for UltraSparc. Make up your freaking mind SUN. I still like SUN hardware for dense deployments where you got tons of racks, since Intel and AMD both run considerably hotter than UltraSparc. Sun needs to make up its mind about whether they believe UltraSparc has a future and stick to it. PC hardware is still isn't as reliable as high end Unix, so it's stupid to drop their R&D for high end systems. Some things simply scale better vertically than horizontally.
    • Thats what this announcement does - it says 'more high end SPARC chips with faster clocks are coming' in addition to the throughput computing chips they previously announced. What's so confusing about that? Agree totally about what you said about vertical scale and reliability and heat

  • Open-source platform for games (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I wonder if funding a kind of open-sourced game development platform wouldn't help the hardware manufacturers (e.g. Sun in this case for the processors and ATI etc. for the graphics) sell their wares. All 3D-engine stuff wide open and free, so that a prospective game maker would not have to buy an engine license.

    Problems of course:
    - need an installed base to sell enough games
    - state of the art engine does not grow on trees
    - willingness of hardware types to work together

    Possible Pros:
    - open standard encour

  • In two years SPARC won't exist (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @09:02AM (#9313657)
    With the Millenium project dead and buried Sun is relying on Ultra SPARC III to carry the comapny until "Mid 2006" when Fujitsu's and Sun's products will be shared between them. The current Niagra design (from Afara) is so low end that Sun will be luck to sell a few hundred systems based on it. If they didn't need a throughput computing product on the market RIGHT NOW they would have killed Niagra already.

    When the inevitable schedule slips on Niagra II and Rock come to light (the original Niagra from Afara was "almost done" when Sun bought them two years ago, it's only just taped out) Sun will have no choice but to fall on it's sword and admit defeat. The company might survive if it can convince enough customers to recompile and move to Opteron based systems while sticking with Solaris, but that's going to be a hard sell when they can recompile for linux and not be locked into Sun's software/services stack.
  • IMHO this is a wise move by Sun. They can not only share their (considerable) R&D costs with Fujitsu, but they can take advantage of some of the nice performance gains FS have been able to make with SPARC64 (FS machines are big in HPC environments, where Sun doesn't have much traction). This will help their margins and maybe finally they can be profitable again. The other thing is that it gives the SPARC platform a united front and potentially greater market coverage (especially in Europe, where FS are

  • Itanium crushing something? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by invisik ( 227250 ) * on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @10:10AM (#9314283) Homepage
    I don't think the Itanium is going to be crushing anything in it's short lifetime. However, the PowerPC/Opteron chips are putting the smack down quite nicely about now. We need them to bring back that Open spec for PPC hardware so we can get some serious speed and off of Intel..... !

    -m

  • Worst intro paragraph ever! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by oldmanmtn ( 33675 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @10:30AM (#9314460)
    Sun and Fujitsu just announced a 20-year partnership to jointly develop SPARC based technology and systems.

    They have had a partnership for 20 years - they aren't announcing a new one.

    My guess: Sun drops Ultrasparc III

    Sun is already shipping the Ultrasparc IV. Nice guess!

    to provide the Throughput computing chips for the low end / web / network stuff,

    They have already announced that this is exactly what they are going to do. Again: nice guess!

    and takes up the Fujitsu provided SPARC64 chips for the high end and workstation market.

    Yesterday's announcement was all about using SPARC64 on the high end. Usually the trick is reading between the lines - not reading the lines themselves.

    Sun also announced that they will be using Opterons in their new workstation line - not SPARC64.

    Will this spark a new RISC renaissance for Sun and Fujitsu? Or is it a last gasp before Opteron / PowerPC / Itanium crush them?

    Itanium has gone white dwarf. The only thing it will be crushing is itself.

    Opteron is not going to crush Sun. They have announced that they are shipping multiple Opteron boxes (1-8 way servers and 1-2 way workstations).

    This could really revitalize the SPARC system market, especially if Sun's work on Throughput computing proves out.

    This doesn't even make sense. The Fujitsu/Sun machines are not the Throughput Computing systems that Sun has been talking about for months. Throughput compututing is Niagara/Rock - the Sun-only CPUs.

  • And I, for one... (Score:3, Funny)

    by the_olo ( 160789 ) on Wednesday June 02, 2004 @10:54AM (#9314769) Homepage
    ...welcome our new Sun&Fujitsu overlords!

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