RE:David Halko
"That's OK - Sun pioneered in heavily multi-core'ed and muti-threaded CPU architecture... and the rest of the market continues to emulate with Intel being the fastest to catch up."
Well it wasn't really SUN, SUN bought the company that made the TX000 servers, it was AFAIR one of the 'original' SUN guys who made that company. Just like the highend servers which they got when they bought Cray's Unix business back in .. 1996 I think it was, wasn't their own creation. And yes the TX00 were innovative and the Niagara family is *GREAT* for what it was designed for. But there isn't not a general purpose box.
As for pioneered, multicores and multi threaded cores, Weeeel.. then the Power RS64 IV had up to 4 threads back in 2000, and you forget that the cell microprocessor came out at the same time as Niagara. And power4 was the first CMT processor back in 2001, where as the UltraSPARC IV (Jaguar) is from 2004.
"That's OK - Sun pioneered in heavily multi-core'ed and muti-threaded CPU architecture... and the rest of the market continues to emulate with Intel being the fastest to catch up."
I don't think that either HP nor IBM could have convinced their customers to give up their single threaded performance. And as for catch up, U forget that SUN is being absolutely trashed in the UNIX markedplace, sad but true. So there are no business reasons to emulate SUN's CMT. If IBM were really worried about the T5XXX line they could have put out a 'Q' version of their POWER6 servers as they did with POWER5+. Actually the 1.8GHz p560 has a higher socket throughput with 0,56 rperf than the power6 power 570. And such an MCM based Q server would have rocked, in benchmarks. But in the real world the server wouldn't have had enough memory to be useful, as when you run in a virtualized environment you use a hell of a lot of memory.
And early here next year we will have POWER7. 8 cores 32 threads on one chip, but still with the same or better single threaded throughput as POWER6.
So right now a T5XX0 might be 1.5 times faster per socket than a power 5x0 box. But with four times the cores and a bit more umph on each core, then it will be something like a factor of 2-3 the other way around. Sure rainbow falls with 16 cores will make a difference but IMHO it's just more of the same 128 statically scheduled threads versus 32 SMT threads where one thread actually can use the whole processor.
And as for the whole storage setup on the T5440 RAC benchmark, I tip my hat at that one.
But for the fact that you can quickly burn your way through a flash card if you write alot. Now I know that some SSD vendors simply just reserve half of the drive so as to extend the lifespan of the drive. And that would work for me.
Now the whole 'lots of disks on the benchmark' is a hack, In my world you have Big Tin Disk boxes from Hitachi,HP,STOR^H^H^HUN,EMC,IBM and Netapp that can do a lot of IO/sek by using cache. But as the TPCC benchmark is also about price, they are to expensive to use on such a benchmark. Hence you use a lot of disks. I find the disk price of the benchmark irrelevant, as in my world the disk systems are a constant, no mather what server or vendor we use.
"Sun's innovation in benefited and will benefit the entire global computing community for years to come while IBM's innovation benefited only themselves and a few customers for a short period of time.
There is good reason to argue that this behavior is a primary reason why Sun was not consistently profitable and IBM typically is.
Sun = Innovation ; IBM = Business"
I think you are very wrong. I grew up on BSD and Solaris Unix wise. I learned like a good UNIX boy at university to hate IBM, cause they were the big bad mainframe monopoly. And they were in the late 80'ies. But in the early 90'ies in my first IT job I had to use AIX and power, I lobbied for a HP or SUN box, but actually I got to like AIX with it's logical volume manager, SMIT menu interface, and easy to use cli where everything was like chxx mkxx lsxx rmxx. And you were the underdog as a AIX admin, that had to listen to how good Solaris, HPUX and Whatever name digitals Unix used at the moment. But us in the AIX admin department could "outadmin" the other admins, cause while they were editing files, and sending signals to deamons we just did a chxx and then a refresh -s subsystem. Or when they were formatting drives, and tying in sectors and sh*t, you simply did an extendvg and then that was done.
This is where my preference for AIX on power was founded.
But you seem to forget that the whole basis of SUN+Oracle's business depends on IBM inventions. IBM and others (not SUN) invented the RISC processor. IBM invented the relational database and SQL. And if they were such a monopoly, they why are SUN and Oracle in business at all ? Not to mention EMC, cause IBM invented the hard drive.
And if it hadn't been for the IBM PC, then neither Microsoft nor INTEL would be the giants they are today. What ground breaking technology have SUN invented besides Java ?
If you search for "SUN inventions" on google, the whole first page is about a novel.
How many nobel price winners have SUN fostered ? IBM is 5 or something, and not in economics, but in physics with discoveries like the tunneling microscope, and high-temperature superconductivity.
And you say SUN is innovating for the global computing community. Ok, that is why SUN was the very first to finance SCO's attack on Linux. Simply great, buy the rights to make Solaris code public, while trying to put Linux in the grave. No it wasn't Microsoft who were the first to go after linux using SCO as a proxy. It was SUN.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1016_3-1024633.html
And we are many pasionate linux users who hasn't forgotten that move.
So yes IBM is all about business, but damn so is SUN. And when it comes to innovation, SUN is, or rather was, no match for IBM.
// Jesper