Posts by Matt Bryant

RE: Kebabbert

Geez, someone switch this kiddie to the sugar-free coke, fast!

"Do you still believe that Niagara SPARC suffers from a too small cache?...." Yes. You provided nothing of note to convince me otherwise.

".....Do you still believe that the sloooooooow IBM Power CPU is a server CPU?...." No, I believe the Power CPU is actually a fast server CPU, from the empirical evidence of seeing it run real world applications.

".....Do you still believe that any CPU can fit in a server-client workload into it's cache?...." As I explained before, you didn't specify what load, so in theory a CPU with a large cache such as Power6 or Itanium2 could do just that. Unrealistic, maybe, but still possible. And totally irrellevant to the current thread, which is about the new evidence that Rock has been quietly axed.

".....Dont you know that many companies have several failed projects? It is normal to have failed projects....." Failed projects are fine as long as the market believes you can carry on making money. The problem for Sun was the market stopped believing and - worse - the customers stopped believing that Sun had a future either. Without current profits or probable future profits, and with a mountainous costs, Sun had little option but to put itself up for sale before the cash ran out.

"....Also, there are SPARC machines with many sockets. And also, the Fujitsu 8 core "VENUS" CPU has quite decent performance. Someone said it is the fastest CPU, I think." Which has nothing to do with the article, which regards the new evidence that development for Rock has stopped and thererfore - logically - Sun must have dropped Rock.

/SP&L

RE: Anonymous: Facts #

"1) Sun is in the process of being acquired, not filing chapter 7, and the acquisition is not final...." Sun was well on the way to chapter 11 with continual losses, and Sun stock holders better pray the acquisition gets final real soon as there are precious few other options. Not one of the other top-line vendors was interested, which means the only other option would be a break-up and garage sale.

"...2) A fact can be proven, and speculating what a company will NEVER do in the future is not a fact....." Agreed. Seeing as Sun won't come out and say whether they have or haven't cancelled Rock, we'll just have to surmise that from the evidence that there is a 99.999% chance Rock is dead. And that's the first time I've seen any Sun product hit five nines!

"...3) CMT has demonstrated excellent database throughput, socket per socket against competitors...." ....in carefully crafted comparisons that just aren't representative of how businesses want to use their databases.

What, no answer to 4?

"....5) Speculating about what Oracle will or will not do, if the acquisition is approved, is not a fact" And wishful thinking by Sunshiners isn't either.

".....6) A question is not a fact....." Yes, but Sun's attempt at "innovation" (Rock's scout threads and transactional memory implementation) has failed, and no-one but you Sunshiners seriously believes Niagara in any form will be enough to flll the gap.

"....7) Answers to questions from an interview with a reporter and very publicly displayed on a corporate web site is not a joke, speculation being suggested as facts from an anonymous source is a joke.,,,," Well, personally I prefer those jokes that start something like a fool, a goat and a Sunshiner walk into a stripjoint....

Before the Indymedia types get fired up.....

Just to make it clear, this was a legal longshot, more in the hope of generating publicity. From a legal standpoint I'm told it had little chance of success, so please don't start the usual tired tirade about it all being an "establishment cover-up" or saying that the judges are just "pawns of the government", etc, etc. You can moan all you like about the one-sidedness of the extradition treaty, but it is still law, and McKinnon has admitted to a crime covered by that agreement, so until that law is changed he's just buying time (at the taxpayers' expense) until he gets shipped off to the Septics. To change that law would require an act of parliament, and that is not likely to complete before McKinnon is in the clutches of the US courts.

Personally, I think that his lawyers are just enjoying the attention, the publicity and no doubt the large paycheques they are getting off this. He should have just gone quietly, done a deal with the Yanks and probably done minimum time in one of their more comfortable prisons, and he'd probably already be back out. Unfortunately, he got collared by the anti-establishment crowd, and they filled his head with stupid ideas about being sent off to Gitmo for life, and ever since the same parasites have just been using him as media bait.

By the way....

One of the guys here has just told us that a kebabbert is a slang term for a "typical Chihuahua owner", that is a rather less than manly fashion victim. Can't say I'm surprised!

RE: Mattie Pattie, boy

"Answer me this. Do you really believe that a server CPU is capable of holding all thousands of different client's data in the CPU cache?...." Well, that depends on how big the dataset is for each customer and what else the cache is being used for. If for example you want to consider Power6, ignoring the L1 cache, there is the shared 4MB of L2 cache and you have 32MB of L3 cache shared between the two cores, so in theory you could actually have several thousand sets of customer data if that dataset was small, say a KB, even if the L3 cache was not all being used by one core. Which just goes to show you really didn't think before you typed.

"....Do you really believe that increasing the Niagara cache size to 12MB (or whatever Power6 has) will help doing server work loads with thousands of different data sets, one for each client?..." Am I susprised you don't know how much cache Power6 has - not really. Like most Sunshiners, you just drink the Sun koolaid and never bother to actualy check what the competition has to offer. In the idael World you like to make believe exists, Niagara only has to contend with applications written with tiny and multiple threads. What happens in reality is Niagara keeps choking because most enterprise apps have heavy single-threaded routines. And then, when Niagara is busy swapping between threads and waiting on RAM, what do you think happens in cache? Are you saying Niagara flushes the cache all the time to make room for all that data coming in for what could be 256 stalled threads? If it does, then it will slow down even more as it has to juggle cache about to meet demand. If it doesn't, if it retains cache between misses, then that means you never have enough cache to actually satisfy 256 threads with only 4MB of L2 cache as on T2. Sun knew this was a problem with T1 as they made the cache bigger for T2, if what you pretend is true then they wouldn't need to, would they? So, obviously, more cache and a better cache handling would benefit Niagara. I'm expecting T3, should it ever arrive, to have a similar growth in cache, maybe as much as 12MB.

"...Power6 is constructed as a desktop CPU, that IBM that falsely advertise as a server CPU...." Well they seem to "falsely advertise" it very well to a lot of very cautious buyers. You may not relaise this but try-before-you-buy is very common in the enterprise, we don't like splashing out money unless we have a very good feeling about a product. If Power6 really was a desktop CPU then it would be found out pretty soon and not bought. If any CPU is a desktop one then it's Niagara, which only scales to 4-way in T2+! Even Xeon and Opteron scale to twice as many sockets in standard servers, let alone more specilised servers such as from Unisys. T2+ is not only a crippled product, it is the most constrained - one supported OS choice, poor expansion options unless you buy additonal I/O expansion modules, and only four internal disk slots.

"....Here we see that a Linux shop measured Niagara CPUs...." Yes, against Opteron, not Power or Itanium. I'm guessing that's beacuse you couldn't find any real independent benchmarks where Niagara wasn't caned by either.

"....It doesnt matter what you say Mattie Pattie boy, facit tells Power6 sucks badly as a server CPU...." Actually, it doesn't matter what you or Sun say about Power6 as the market has obviously made up its mind. Power and Itanium are both taking market share from Sun in the enterprise high-end, which is the most demanding arena and the one that offers the highest margins and pull-through in associated services. With Rock dead, Sun have virtually abandoned the enterprise sector. They are not stupid enough to put T2/T2+ up against Power or Itanium as they know it can't compete, which is why they are desperate to keep Fujitsu making SPARC64s. You whole argument is completely undermined by these simple, proven facts.

/SP&L

RE: Matt, Oh Matt...

".....The Niagara wins all these benchmarks. Period. And Power6 looses. Thats fact....." And the big fact I have constantly been telling you, my obtuse little foreigner, is that you are looking at a tiny subset of the available benchmarks, and none of them from real World environments. Niagara wins only a very narrow selection of benchmarks, which is what you are concentrating on and then pretending that they make Niagara a superior design, when the evidence from the marketplace is Niagara is niche, and a low-end niche at that.

"...Have you finally understood why Niagara doesnt need a big cache?...." What I have come to understand is that the universities on the continent must be really dropping their entry requirements if they even let you in the door. Niagara needs a complete redesign, not just more cache, but there is no way that will happen as there is no-one to pay for it. Sun doesn't have the money, and Larry is concentrating on making a profit, not throwing good money after bad. Rock has already been killed off, I'm pretty sure Niagara will follow soon. Your own business doesn't even listen to you, why should anyone else waste their time with your waffle.

".....Have you finally understood that a server swaps different software in and out all the time, and therefore a large cache is not as useful as it is for a workstation?....." It is becoming very obvious that you know nothing about enterprise computing. Cache is very important with large applications, it is one of the reasons Itanium also trounces Niagara, UltraSPANKed and SPARC64. It is frankly astonishing that anyone working in computing could pretend otherwise, but then I'm beginning to suspect that is because you work as the teaboy in your company office.

"....That is the reason the Power6 is sloooow on server workloads...." Yeah, so slow it just happens to be used for real enterprise power applications like SAP, Siebel, Oracle, etc, etc, whereas Niagara is rarely used outside its little webserving niche. Argue all you like but the facts are there in the market figures, as illustrated by your own company's choices.

".....But granted, the Power6 suits better as a Desktop CPU....." Probably the most stupid thing you have posted. Power6 is designed as a large SMP solution - it is designed to work in servers that scale, not in desktops. Please show me a single desktop using Power6, but better still please show me a major enterprise solution, like a telco billing solution or a major stock exchange, that is using Niagara for the core database and applications. I can think of examples for Itanium and Power, but none for Niagara. In fact, neither can Sun. A quick check of the Sun website shows they obviously don't think Niagara is a choice for an enterprise core solution, instead they list the likely key applications as "Media gateway controllers, Telcom operations and maintenance, Signaling gateways, Intelligent networks, MMS/SMS, unified messaging, Shipboard command and control", which are mainly telco edge services. So Sun don't seem to agree with you either, are you now going to call them liars or illeducated?

/can continental unis really be turning out such poor quality graduates?

RE: Kebabbert & Novatose (a new comedy duo!)

Oh dear, Kebabbert still hasn't got round to taking a reading class, his lack of comprehension is just staggering! Imagane that - someone that can be obtuse in five languages!

"....If Niagara doesnt have ENOUGH cache, how can it win all benchmarks? If it lacks lots of functionality to do it's work, how can it be the fastest? I dont get it. Do you mean that all benches are lies?...." <Sigh> It's like talking to the village idiot. Probably a Schwabian village idiot at that! As I have said before, Niagara does not win all the benchmark sessions, are you seriously telling me you have checked EVERY single publically available benchmark and declared Niagara the winner in each? If so then there is only one word for that, and unfortuantely it is the word you throw around with abandon - a lie.

Please point me to the Niagara benchmark result for a 64-way system. Oh, you can't, because Niagara doesn't scale. How about T2+ versus Itanium or Xeon running MS SQL Server? RHEL and MySQL maybe? Darn, just can't do either of those on one-trick-pony Niagara, so we'll just have to mark that up as another big fail on Sun's part. Oh dear, looks like I've just poked a very big hole in your blindfold, hope I didn't take an eye out in the process. Please feel free to apologise for accusing me of being a liar in your next post.

"....I and others have posted links that shows that Niagara wins lots of benchmarks. And you claim that the benchmarks are lying? Explain that to me. Prove your claim...." Oh, you mean old Novatose's posts? Don't worry about him, we had a good laugh at him before in this thread http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/27/hp_sun_oem_comment/comments/ when he tried cherry-picking SAP benchmarks. I never said they were "lying" benchmarks, just that they were carefully selected to try and paint a positive picture. All vendors do it, if you'd been in the industry a little bit longer than five minutes you'd know that. But my basis for argument is not someone else's benchmarks, I have done my own, and there is no way I'm going to ignore my own empirical evidence in favour of your fantasy "technical" advice, especially as it is clear you have never benchmarked anything.

You see, there is actually only one really true benchmark, and it is the market. You can have what you think is the cleverest product in the World, but if the market doesn't believe it or the market just doesn't need it then it will fail. That is what killed Sun - it failed the market bench session because it had unwanted products and unconvincing strategies, the customers simply bought elsewhere. You may notice that other companies such as IBM, hp and Dell are doing a lot better. Well, you might if you took your head out of the sand.

/SP&L, especially at Novatose's ickle new friend.

PS: I do have an agenda. After years of having to suffer Sun's and their partners' selling tactics, FUD and increasingly shoddy kit and ropey support, I take serious afront to anyone trying to tell me that Sun is the greatest/cleverest/best server maker ever.

RE: Matt, Oh Matt...

"One good thing is that you dont state those ignorant things about Niagara anymore, that it needs more cache...." Oh, I'm sorry, did you very stupidly mistake my not having to say it over and over again as somehow agreeing with you? OK, again just for you - Niagara doesn't have enough cache. It also has a crappy design that means even if they added in more cache, the cores still wouldn't be able to use it in an optimal manner becasue Sun designed them as crippled cores to meet a pricepoint.

"....But, Niagara doesnt need those techniques as it has a radically new approach...." Yes it is different, thought not radical, just a complete acceptance of failure. Sun couldn't design a core that could match x64 with proper bandwidth, so they instead decided to rope sixteen wheiner cores into one die in an attempt to fool customers into thinking they could run 264 concurrent threads. They just forgot to say the threads were too small to run any of their current apps, and those stalled threads would mean memory and cache tied up and not available to active threads, which all meant that on anything more stressing than xclock Niagara couldn't keep up with an Atom, let alone Xeon. Customers that tried to run existing Oracle apps from their UltraSPARC Netras couldn't believe how poor the performance was, which was why Sun was forced to take the M3000 with SPARC64 to market, because Niagara just couldn't do the job required.

"....Excuse my language, but this is just plain bull s**t. If you really had studied something technical, you would had have such difficulties to understand the new radical approach of Niagara...." Your problem is you just can't accept that someone can understand the technical "merits" of Niagara but at the same time see exactly how it doesn't meet the requirements of the market, and the reason is because you are just too obtuse to see the latter. Or maybe that's deliberately obtuse. Either way, since you obviously didn't attend the same educational institutions as myself, you have no idea what qualifications I have.

"....Actually, I will not say more about what I have done, but regarding academical merits, I know that I am one of few at one of the Europe's best Universities...." And there's the admission we expected - zero practical experience, fresh out of your ivory tower. Mind you it's not surprising you have a problem comprehending my posts as English is not your first language, and it looks like techincalese is not natural to you either. Don't worry, when you've finished in whatever kindergarten you're studying at in Germany or wherever, come over to the UK and we'll find you a proper uni to study at.

"....Sadly, management wont buy SUN hardware, despite it being faster and cheaper...." Maybe that's becasue they have the experience and market savvy you don't have. Or maybe because Sun just isn't faster and cheaper like you think it is. Did you ever stop to wonder why your bosses don't buy Sun, especially considering the financial market used to be Sun's playground?

"....If these things you say were true, how come it wins in all the bench marks then?...." Here's a hint - Niagara doesn't win all the benchmarking sessions. Believe me, despite what Sun told you it did, it doesn't. If it did, then they would never have needed Rock or SPARC64 and I'd be recommending to my boss we buy Sun. But we haven't bought any Sun for years. However, we have bought Xeon, Power, Itanium and Opteron.

/has Ponytail been leafletting the nurseries now???

RE: Matt Bryant

Oh dear, the separation from reality is strong with this one. Even Novatose didn't quite hit this level of denial!

"Oh, it is always a pain in the *** trying to explain some business people on technology...." I'm guessing that's because it's not your job to, seeing as you obviously have no clue about what happens in the enterprise computing field. It is my job to, and I do it often to people with real financial power on matters that affect the future of my company. All your theoretical nonsense is just fine until you apply it to the reality of the marketplace, and then the complete lack of penetration of Niagara into the enterprise datacentre is painfull evidence of just how wrong you are. Sun designed Rock to be the heavyweight of the team, and when Rock died they were left with a gaping hole in the range that Niagara just cannot fill. Why do you think even before that Sun brought out the M3000? Because Niagara just does not meet the general UNIX requirements of us customers, it is a niche solution. Go back to your ivory tower, any more time in the real World is likely to cause you mental anguish.

"....The worst thing is when they havent done the basic computer architecture courses at the University..." But don't tell me, you are the World's greatest mind and silicon design authority. Yeah, right! But let me put your worries to rest - I studied amongst other things many of the electronic theories that govern transistor design, from basics such as what happens at breakdown right through to complex logic gate modelling, so I can quite happilly tell you to get off your high horse and stop assuming you are the cleverest and most knowledgeable person in the room. I'm betting a fair number of the readers here exceed both mine and your knowledge and experience combined. Your display of typical Sunshiner arrogance just makes you sound all the sillier.

"....And it doesnt help when they apply unsound logic either....." And another typical Sunshinerism - "only my argument/product/solution/logic is sound, everyone else is a liar/newbie/idiot for not agreeing with me". Give it a rest you wannabe Einstein, there's a whole market out there that has shown that they can do their own thinking and that thinking is why they are not buying Sun. You can label and insult everyone that doesn't agree with you however you like, but the reality is you have zero real input to the market because you are so obviously not working in a real enterprise environment. I hope you enjoy yourself, but please remember the rest of us have real work to do, and we base our decisions on a lot more than fantasy.

I'm scanning through the rest of your diatribe looking for something relevant, but it's just more insults and repeated waffling. I especially like the comparison to VHS and Betamax as it is often used by technical people in an attempt to paint their failed solution as technically superior, when all it does is highlight their lack of understanding of the market. I owned a Sony Betamax player, and later I replaced it with a VHS one. Later still I replaced it with a number of DVD players, but I haven't yet upgraded to Blu-Ray. Now, look at that sequence of products and try and consider it from a consumer persepctive rather than the technical one you so obviously stuck in. Yes, Betamax was a superior technology, which is why I initially purchased it, but my REQUIREMENT was to watch videos, so as soon as VHS made more sense I was happy to surrender the supposed superior technology of the Betamax format as VHS did the job just fine and a lot cheaper with wider choice. And until DVDs came along, VHS carried on meeting my requirement, as it did for the majority of consumers. Some idiots insisted on sticking with Betamax, claiming they were somehow smarter whilst struggling with the declining number of Betamax releases and players. Nowadays, DVD is the norm, with Blu-Ray still not offering enough of an advantage to get the majority of users to switch. That is a PERFECT analogy for Sun, SPARC and Slowaris - the diehard Sunshiners are still insisting Sun's products are the Betamax option because of some theoretical technical benefits the majority of users don't need, and that majority of the market has moved on to VHS and now DVDs. Niagara is like a multi-slot Betamax player - technically interesting, but as rellevant to the average buyer as a chocolate teapot. Despite all your much-mentioned education, you really need to get out into the marketplace and get some real World experience, you'll probably learn more real practical and valuable knowledge in your first six months than you did during any of your degrees. I certainly did.

As to your advice on how to bench Niagara, there's one slight problem - the real World does not craft solutions to meet a CPU's requirements, but solutions to meet business requirements. The reason Niagara is niche is EXACTLY BECAUSE it's design does not reflect the requirements of the market. You are correct in describing Niagara as a Gatling gun as the modern Gatling gun is just the aplication of modern technology (electric drive and belt feed) to historic technlogy (the hand-cranked, magazine-fed Gatling). Niagara is a desperate attempt to prolong the historic tech of SPARC and Slowaris by applying the new technology of die-shrinking for multiple cores, the only problem being they had to cripple the cores to get them to fit the pricepoint. That's like taking a modern Gatling and making it fire .25 ACP, then pretending it will shoot to the same range as a Ma Deuce.

To use your analogy, Sun is offering a Gatling gun (Niagara) as a single-use item, without any mounting, poor support and no roadmap of how they are going to improve the tech, with it's big brother armoured system (Rock) having just been cancelled, and a history of telling customers that their backup offering (x64 as in Galaxy) is for the mentally retarded. The rest of the competition are offering MBTs with proven track records in reliability, performance, sheer kick-ass grunt, a flexible platform that allows the same vehicle design to be re-used as the bassis of a number of roles, and believable roadmaps based on delivering product, and all backed up with x64 partner offerings that make Galaxy look narrow. Guess which offering is more attractive to your average army? I'll give you a clue seeing as you are obviously unused to thinking outside your neat little Sun-lined academic box - it ain't Sun's saturday night special, no matter how many barrels they put on it.

/Ah, Sunshiners - the comedy just keeps on and on!

RE: Billl

"Matt, stop showing your ignorance...." Anyone still pushing Sunshine after the Sunset, the massive decline in SPARC sales and the current uncertainty as to what current Sun hardware will even be available in a year's time, really hasn't got the right to accuse anyone of ignorance.

"....The design of CMT makes smaller caches possible...." Nope, the design of T2/T2+ means you have to make do with small cache split between all the cores and being flushed continuously as you switch between stalled threads. And every time there is a cache miss it's off to RAM ( relatively slow), local disk (very slow) or the SAN (extermely slow!). Which is why T2/T2+ can only shine with wheiner-threaded apps or light loads like webserving.

".....It does not require larger caches....." Which is a bit like saying "my car doesn't need a bigger engine as I'm happy crawling along at a slow speed". Of course it needs more cache! Any CPU design will benefit from more cache. Actually, I should rephrase that - any CPU design will benefit from a competant cache design that uses good prediction technologies to try to avoid the lag of going to RAM or out to disk. Since Sun can't match IBM or Intel or either of those two points it would be more accurate to say the T2/T2+ designs can't use more cache even though the design desperately needs it. Even after T2/T2+ forces users to recompile their old Slowaris apps to get away from the old heavy threads of UltraSPARC, they still have a tiny cache space for each thread as the cache is shared between so many cores and stalled threads. Compared to Nehalem, Power6+ or Tukwila, T2/T2+ is cache-starved and has poor memory bandwidth.

The reason it's unfair to compare T2/T2+ to those real enterprise CPUs is beacuse T2/T2+ was never meant to be a real datacenter CPU, it was always meant to be the cheaper option for webserving whilst Rock was supposed to do the heavy lifting. Now, with Rock dead, the Sunshiners are desperately spinning T2/T2+ as some kind of Rock replacement, when the reality is it's like taking a waterpistol to a five alarm fire when everyone else has a proper firetruck.

"....The fact is that Intel is forced to increase Cache because they have not and cannot do any kind of innovation in the core of the CPU...." Yeah, that whole EPIC thing was handed to hp and Intel on a plate - not! The facts are that IBM and Intel have moved on from RISC, IBM with a semi-RISC design whilst Intel have taken hp's EPIC and moved it forward. Sun are stuck trying to still peddle RISC, their only "innovation" being to try and strip the RISC core down an make it tiny so they can squeeze more onto a die. The truth is hp/Intel have innovated the most, IBM have followed, and Sun has innovated the least. Rock was supposed to be their innovative design - it failed.

"....Now, go and look at your HP/UX load and see how many CPU's are stalled waiting on memory...." Actually, with good coding, not as many as you Sunshiners like to claim. I know you like to pretend that everyone else's CPUs are spending most of their time idling, but that's just the daydream you like to believe because it helps you keep faith.

"....That exorbitant cache is not always helping you, except in some very cache friendly situations...." Like running large enterprise applications such as databases, perhaps? Just because you want to believe having large cache is not an advantage, it does not make it true. Even if there wasn't the evidense of comparing different models of the Intel CPUs with different cache sizes, common sense would let anyone with half a clue about computing realise that large caches are going to help as they cut down on the amunt of calls to memory and disk. For you to say otherwise is just such obvious male bovine manure. You lot are like the Black Knight out of "Monty Python & The Holy Grail", insisting that having your legs and arms cut off is not a problem.

"....It will clear up much of your misguided HP FUD...." Yes, I'm so sure Sun FUD will help clear it all up - not! By the way, did you notice that big drop in Sun sales? That was because the rest of us don't believe that Sun FUD. You are wasting your time posting it here.

RE: Matt Bryant

".....Huh? You didnt understand anything I wrote, did you?...." Let's see, looking back at what you wrote.... Yeah, I did, it's just I saw it for the complete Sunshine it was.

"....SUNs Niagara design ALLOWS a small cache...." Lol, that's like saying a Yugo ALLOWS a smaller engine compared to a Porsche. It's not that the design allows a small cache, it's that the design forces a small cache for two reasons - one, it is supposed to be a cheap design to fight x64, so Sun can't afford to put too much cache on it; and two, it would not be possible for Sun to provide enough cache for all the cores as there is not enough space on the die, and to make it larger would make it both hotter and much more pricey. Sun CHOSE to make the design with small cache as they always thought they would have Rock to take on Power and Itanium.

"....You must devote many transistors to these two things. Transistors that can be better spent elsewhere....." Yes, like in real cores. The problem for your little bit of fantasy is that Nehalem has proper cores and much more cache at a lower price, and Power and Itanium manage to include real cores with much larger register counts because they are full-scale enterprise designs, not cheap alternatives.

".....Ive told you that you do NOT want to spend all these transistors on enormous caches and prefetch logic....." Well, you don't if you're Sun and you're desperately trying to fight off Xeon. Of course, Power and Itanium weren't designed to fight Xeon but each other, and they do so with no holds barred. They have large transistor counts becasue they have larger register counts, fatter pipeslines and properly implemented technologies such as cache prediction, whereas T2/T2+ has always been a compromise to meet a pricepoint in a lower league. If that wasn't true then Sun would never had felt the need to design Rock or use Fujitsu's SPARC64 chips.

"....The less transistors, the less heat and the less complex the chip will be....." And the less it will be able to do. You can't have it both ways. By making T2/T2+ with such simple cores and so little cache, Sun made a chip that was never going to be competitive in anything other than webserving.

"....This translates to easier to manufacture, easier to debug, higher quality, better yield, etc etc etc....." Oh yeah, that worked out so well for you on Rock, which also had a simplified RISC core design, though not quite as crippled as T2/T2+. And the new and higher-clocked T2/T2+ parts are suspected of just being from deep sorts of the bins, which means they are zero innovation.

"....And then you make remarks as "HAHAHAHAHA!!, Niagara doesnt have a big cache and no complex prefetch logic! HAHAHAHAHA!!!"....." Did I post "HAHAHAHAHA"? Nope, must be that imagination of yours. It seems quite fertile, if a little unoriginal.

"...I suggest you should study more...." Sorry, too busy doing real enterprise work, which included doing comparative benching of Niagara against Xeon. I'm guessing the only benching you do would be in a park.

"....I have double M Sc degree, one in math, the other in comp sci..." Which just goes to show that education is no protection agaist the idiocy of the Sunshine. Did you also brag about your qualifications earlier this year when you were no doubt telling everyone that Sun wasn't up for sale, that Rock was a sure-fire success, etc, etc? I'm not going to list qualifications or even where I studied, as it would be rather crass, but let's just say you're not winning in that area either.

".....You should learn a bit more about computer architectures before making such ignorant remarks?..." Ah, the old Sunshiner standard - "if you don't agree with me it must be because you are ignorant and stupid". Well, it looks like the majority of the market are just as stooooooopid, 'cos we aren't buying Sun. Does it frustrate you that you are just so gosh-darn smart but all the stupid little people don't listen to you?

"....As I told you, the CPUs has been faster and faster, whereas the RAM has not evolved in the same way....." Of course! That old EDO RAM in my loft is just as fast as DDR3, how stupid of me to spend all that money buying DDR3! I'm so glad there is someone as clever as you to set me straight. Now, if only we could get you to work on World peace.....

"....The only way the fast CPU could avoid cache misses is if the CPU had Extrasensory Perception and Psychic powers to predict the next data to fetch in advance...." Well, here in reality we use cache algorithms. You may want to take some time of from your next MSc to do a little reading about algorithms such as least frequently used, adaptive replacement, or multi-queue caching. You'll find there is no ESP required, but it may require you to take a step out of your fantasyland.

"....And if you persist stating a fast CPU has fewer cache misses than a slow CPU, then I require a proof from you. Show me papers supporting your false statement...." Did I say that? Even if I did, how do you prove the statement is false? You didn't. Did you post any links to paper supporting your waffle? No. And you "require" proof from me? What are you, my teacher? Looks like your studying missed out a big section of basic comprehension as well as basic manners. But let's just think about your statement, using that logic you are so hot on. The point I mentioned is that Itanium, Nehalem and Power have MORE cache than T2/T2+, not that they are faster clock speeds. The logical conclusion would be that you want to drag the conversation away from this fact by a brash assertion that I am "lying" about something completely different. Either that or you're just an idiot talking through your rectum.

"....A large cache is something you want to avoid. It is not a good thing....." OK, you can't seriously expect anyone to swallow that massive lump of male bovine manure! If your requirement is performance, then the larger the cache the better! But then I'm guessing you only want to consider such factors as power consumption, where the T2/T2+ is superior. The reality is companies will pay to get performance, even if it is power-hungry, because they really need it for those enterprise applications.

"....The Niagara has small cache, and still it outperforms Power6 at 5GHz....." In what way does it outperform it? On what test, using what application, to fit which business requirement? My own experience is that Niagara has zero chance of outperfroming Power6 in any of our business uses, except webserving. And even then we use x64 for webserving as it is easier, more flexible and far cheaper.

"....If the things you write were true about the Niagara beeing inferior to Power6, how come the Power6 bites the dust by a large margin in the benches? You should apply some logic on your statements first. It helps a lot." You really can't be so stupid as to believe that one carefully crafted bench makes Niagara faster than Power6! I'm sure if I called Armonk they'd supply me with a dozen equally carefully crafted bench sessions showing Power6 walking all over Niagara. The fact is neither has any bearing on my actual business requirements, and that's even after admiting we use Oracle and Siebel. I have benchmarked Niagara, using our apps in our environment, with Sun providing the tuning, and it provided miserable Oracle performance when we compared it to Power5/6, "Montecito" Itanium, "Barcelona" Opteron and "Tigerton" Xeon. You can squeal accusations and your beliefs all you like, I've seen the reality, and my logic is that what I have touched and seen far outweighs what you are daydreaming of in Sunshinerville.

/SP&L

RE: Kebabbert

So, they made the cores faster, but didn't fix the real problems like the too small cache. And when will people stop describing any Niagara as being capable of running 256 threads - it can't run them concurrently, at most there are only ever sixteen wheiner threads running, and they are all waiting on the too small cache. I nearly fell of the chair laughing when you tried to attack Intel on cache hit ratios - Intel's cache hit ratios for all their x64 and Itanium range are far better than any Sun CPU's.

But, more to the point, chips like Nehalem and Power not only have real cores that can handle proper threads, they have larger caches and more bandwidth to the chip courtesy of technology such as DDR3 memory, which keeps the cores spinning more. Niagara is Sun admitting they can't keep the cores spinning, it is a surrender to poor bandwidth design. Making the cores slightly faster is not going to help much other than make them even more starved by the lack of cache. The idea of seriously comparing any T2/T2+ server to a Power6 server is simply laughable, it' like putting a courier's moped up against an articulated lorry. Sure, the moped may get across town faster when all you want to send is a parcel, but for shipping that grand piano you want the lorry.

Morning, Sunshiners

So, Ms Bee gave you your day without counters to post your insights into where Soracle might go, and you posted..... Well, nothing. In fact, apart from Billl's rather odd belief that the hardware bizz that killed Sun can somehow make Oracle money unchanged (how?), the Sunshiners all seem to have scuttled back to their holes to sulk. Or maybe they were just busy updating their LinkedIn profiles in prep for a bit of jobhunting....

Not one has even pointed out with the usual boundless optimism that there are companies shopping for storage businesses to plug into their existing ranges. CISCO may not have wanted all of Sun, but they may buy the storage bizz. And, most amusing of all, Dell is currently shopping around for something similar. Now wouoldn't it be ironic if Dell, the patron saint of x86 and Windows, ended up buying parts of Sun to make appliances with. It could work, especially if they managed to get de-dupe working in ZFS (and NetApp were persuaded to settle the courtcase). So, Larry sells the Sun storage bizz, makes his profit and that gives him time to take the axe to the rest of the Sun carcass.

/Enjoy!

RE: Intelligent responses

"Why do The The Register allow such blatantly ignorant and childish responses from Matt Bryant but edit out others that they don't deem suitable ?....." Are the Sunshiners hoping a little fakery will get me banned? Boy, you guys really have issues dealing with any view that doesn't correspond to your own.

"....Matt - do you realise how your posts make you come across ?...." Well, a tad smarter than the average Sunshiner given the topic.

"....Time for some decent journalism and constructive comments PLEASE !" And where's your input on the subject then? Given that Larry has said he plans on making $1.5bn from at least some of the existing Sun product and services in the coming year, would you care to hypothesise on how? I'm guessing you're not thinking employee cuts and hikes in MySQL licensing. Maybe you still believe the Slowaris on x64 is still going to storm the datacenter, despite the uncertainty, the established Linux opposition, and the NetApp courtcase over ZFS? Please enlgihten us.

/this should be amusing at least!

RE: Sun is dead

Looks like the Sunshiners aren't even trying to mount a defence before they wheel out the fake Matt Bryant login. Not really surprised, though, as even the most ardent Sunshiner can't still be holding out much hope of a new Sunrise. I was hoping at least one would try and tell us it is all just the recession, that being a third down wasn't that bad, etc, etc, but I suppose even they have finally got a clue.

I will have to go do the maths and work out of the Sun quarterly loss is actually a larger amount than the golden parachute payouts to the Sun board. Amazing that they can actually demand so much money to basically walk away from the mountain of fail they made.

/<insert amused smile at childish Sunshiner antics here>

RE: Sun's 'Niagara' family of Sparc T servers are VERY competitive!!!

You can always relie on Novatose! Even after the market has shown how little they believe the Sunshine he's out there plugging away, spewing out SPEC stats.

"....The CoolThreads T family was built for web facing applications......" Hold on a sec, is this the admission that Niagara is designed for the web niche that Novatose was so energetically denying earlier this year? Last time he was insisting it was perfect for enterprise apps like Oracle and SAP, but now he admits it's just a webserving wannabe. Problem with that admission is - although it's a very large niche - it means customers will look at the broad swathe of uses they can put their flexible x64 servers to, then look at the narrow spectrum of where Niagara makes sense, and they will largely go with the general purpose x64. If it was any otherwise you'd see web companies like Google throwing out all their cookie-tray x64 servers and buying nothing but Niagara, and we know that didn't happen.

".....For what the CoolThreads T processor are built for, they are very competitive, consistently being years ahead in throughput performance against X64 processor released." Which means they are completely irrellevant for 99% of the tasks customers buy x64 servers for, because x64 performs adequately to very well at a much lower price and with a much wider range of apps. The reality is Niagara is simply too expensive and too restricted to survive, especially in a downturn, even if it does outperfrom x64 in one niche area.

People like Novatose may still be daydreaming but I suspect Larry has already seen the light, and it ain't Sunshine. It's simple maths. Unless Larry can find a way to balance the books so that the money made by Niagara in its webserving niche exceeds the costs of developing, building and selling the servers then he will simply not do it. The only way for Larry to come even close would be a massive reduction in the Sun hardware business, which the cancellation of Rock was probably a precursor to, but he will have to cut a lot closer to the bone soon. Hence the rumours of the rest of the hardware bizz being offered again to companies like hp.

/SP&L

RE: RE: EPIC design superior to RISC??

I must have upset Mrs B seeing as my haven't posted my last response. Anyhoooo, on with the fun!

"Spoken like a true HP "Enterprise presales consultant" there Matt...." Do you think I should ask hp for a job then? I'm not sure they could afford me. Or are you merely implying that hp's customers and hp are so in-tune, compared to Sun and their few remaining customers? If it's more of that "Matt works for hp" male bovine manure then all I'm going to do is yawn.

"....marketing bollox with little credible evidence offered to substantiate your claims...." Hmmmm, Sun being sold for chump change and Oracle trying to sell off what's left of the Sun server bizz would seem to indicate that I'm a lot closer to the truth than the Sunshine you have been peddling.

Then you eschew off into a Power6+ vs Itanium schpiel - why? Are you Sunshiners jumping ship already? I'm especially amused by the bit "....people find AIX harder to learn.... - are you a Sunshiner pretending to be an IBMer? Most people have a preference, usually around what UNIX they first start with, just like mine is hp-ux, and I don't know any AIX admin that would say anything like that.

"....Look how HPUX's share is also dropping...." All UNIX is dropping as x64 moves up the food-chain, what you neglest to mention is that hp-ux is falling slower than the average, which means it is not being hit as badly as Slowaris, for example. I'm guessing you also missed the Reg article that said hp Integrity was the only enterprise platform that beat the drop rate this last quarter.

"....it's been liek that for years and factor in the abortinate HPUX licence costs that come alongside the overpriced Itanium system you run it on. Not exactly a free download...." Just to fill in a gaping hole in your knowledge, the base hp-ux bundle comes included with the Itanium server at no extra cost, and you can order it as either media disks or a free ISO download (what hp call and e-licence). And as for "overpriced", the quote we get for Integrity are usually cheaper than pSeries or M-series, and that's before we factor in the lifecycle savings from better management tools, etc. I'm sure we get an excellent discount, but if it really was "overpriced" we wouldn't buy it.

"....perhaps in your dreams that HP are a software power house to rival Oracle/IBM...." When did I say this? Whilst hp do produce a large range of software, I wouldn't place them in the same enterprise bracket as IBM or Oracle. But then hp work best by partnering in the enterprise software space, which is why they are also Oracle's and IBM Software's largest partner. Bet you didn't know more IBM software licences get sold for hp servers than IBM's own.

"....As for Storage waffle please agree that EVA are mid-range sh!te...." Sorry, I quite like EVA, and for the same reason I like NetApp - because they work well, are easy to install and manage, and we get them at a good price. Now I know you're a Sunshiner in disguise as otherwise you'd know that IBM badge the NetApp NAS devices.

"...please be honest here and state that HP rebranded HDS is the same as Sun rebranded HDS...." More Sunshine - Sun merely take the product direct from HDS and change the cover, whereas hp are involved with the development, and write their own firmware and software for the XP. Even HDS will admit the XP is a different product.

"....I hope for your own reputation your not about to say how great EVA 8K's are?...." I think my rep will survive me saying I like the old EVA8000, the 8100 and the new 8400. Seems like an awful lot of other customers do too, given the sales figures. Now, can anyone even name the Sun equivalent?

"....LinkedIn offers a profile that really could match you...." Sorry to urinate on your bonfire, but until your post I was completely unaware of LinkedIn. Try again! I'm actually quite interested as to what you think would be on a LinkedIn profile in order for you to think it was me, does it have the legend "I hate Sun and anyone that buys their sh*t - MUAHAHAHAHAA" on it? I can't see a LinkedIn profile with that on it. Try again!

/SP&L

RE: re: RE: yet more ACs

So sad that the Sunshiners are so desperate to avoid discussing the cancellation of Rock that they'll even wheel out the fake Matt Bryant login. What could it be that terrifies them so much about Rock, is it that they fear a domino effect - Rock is cancelled, which knocks demand for high-end Sun even harder than before, which reduces revenues to such a low point next gen Niagara has to be cancelled, which leaves Sunshienrs only with Slowaris on Galaxy, which stutters to a death against the better x64 offerings from hp, IBM and Dell using WIndows and Linux, which leaves the Sunshiners having to swallow their pride and learn another OS. Lol!

/SP&L