"....Tell HP to go packing. Montvale is really just Moncetito with 60 more Mhz. You can't even use the faster front side bus because HP never updated their chipset....." Actualy you'll find (if you knew where to look) that the hp sx2000 and zx2 chipsets had been designed with room for stretch built in, which is why you get a 10% performance boost for that extra 60MHz. That's beacuse - whilst not a complete revamp of the chip - Montvale did have a number of tweaks other than just the 60MHz clock jump which made it a faster chip than Montecito.

"....The Tukwila systems are a complete box swap...." Hehe, I still have the Sun FUD slide saying the same about the change from Madison to Montecito, and they were just as wrong then. Yes, the motherboards have to change, but the rest of the systems are likley to stay the same for the meantime. What I'm looking forward to are the Tukzilla blades which should slot straight into our existing c-class enclosures. Much better than he rip-and-replace of updating off UltraSPARC, where your only choice is complete box-swap and pain or complete box-swap and lots of pain.

"....The delay and migration costs do not justify staying with HP-UX...." No, but the ease of migration (exactly the same OS with exactly the same binaries, no need to recompile anything) is a very good reason to stay with hp-ux, especially compared to trying to get off SPARC Slowaris onto any of the new Sun chips (new binaries or recompiles all the way, except for the SPARC64 systems, but then that's because those are Fujitsu not Sun chips).

"....So when is HP-UX going to be available on Xeon? I hear its already ported...." Well you need to go clear your ears out. Either that or stop listening to those voices in your head. Of course, Sunshiners can take hope in the fact that even Sun saw Slowaris on SPARC was doomed years ago, hence the effort to try and get Slowaris x86 back out of the graveyard. Sun try and tell their customers they're still a hradware company, but it's obvious they have no faith in the chances of their server designs from the amount of time they spend begging IBM, Dell and hp to support Slowaris x86 on their much more successful Xeon servers. If Ponytail has such faith in Niagara and Rock as worldbeaters, why does he keep begging hp to support Slowaris on ProLiant?

Of course, Transitive do give current Sun customers a lifeline that when Rock fails to arrive they can port off SPARC altogether onto Power, Itanium or Xeon. If Sun really wants a secure path, they can dig out the old versions of Slowaris they originally crafted for Itanium before they made the mistake of carrying on with UltraSPARC. Seeing as I have benched Oracle on Slowaris 9 on Transitive on Red Hat on an Itanium Superdome as faster than Oracle on Slowaris on an M9000 I'm pretty confidant even an old Montecito could run Slowaris apps faster than Rock ever will - if Rock ever arrives.

So, while Intel make the relatively simple changes to the integrated memory controllers on Tukzilla, Sun are still scrabbling round in the lab, desperately trying to find the holes in scout-threads and transcational memory for Rock. I suspect the truth is Tukzilla will only have to worry about competing with Power6+/7.