Reply to post: SPARC market is not shrinking because...

SPARC market is not shrinking because...

If we talk about the "actual high end, the top500 supercomputers", so no, top500 is not high end. Supercomputers are just clusters, and clusters can not run business enterprise software (as explained by SGI). The high margin lucrative market is business servers, with as a many as 16/32 sockets. For instance, one single 32-socket IBM POWER P595 server used for the old TPC-C record, costed $35 million. No typo. These large scale-up servers costs very much money, millions. Whereas a cluster is basically the cost of a bunch of nodes and a fast switch - very cheap. And a large cluster such as SGI UV2000 with 10.000 of cores and 64TB RAM - can never run business enterprise software. You need a large scale up Unix server with 16/32 sockets such as SPARC or POWER. Until a couple of months back, there did not exist larger x86 servers than 8-sockets. It is very difficult to build large 16 socket servers, x86 has tried for decades and failed. Now recently SGI released their UV300H which has 16-sockets, but I suspect performance is awful as it is the first generation 16-socket server, whereas SPARC goes up to 64-sockets today. And 64-sockets beat 16-sockets.

Regarding the shrinking Unix market. It is true that Unix market shrinks, but the Oracle engineered tailor made black boxes designed to run business software such as Oracle databases, is increasing very fast. That market is increasing whereas Unix market shrinks. The only time you need large Unix servers today is if you are going to run very very large workloads on business enterprise software, such as SAP. Check the SAP benchmarks, it is RISC all the way at the top. SPARC has top spot with 840.000 saps, whereas the best x86 server has 320.000 saps. x86 does hardly scale to larger than 8-sockets, which is nothing compared to 64-socket SPARC servers.

So if you need extreme enterprise business performance, or extreme RAS reliability, you must choose SPARC/POWER. Otherwise, x86 is fine for the low end.

BTW, the largest POWER8 server is E880 which scales up to 16-sockets and 16TB RAM. The largest SPARC is Fujitsu M10-4S with 64-sockets and 32TB RAM (soon 64TB). This year the Oracle SPARC M7 will be released with 32-sockets, 1.024 cores, 8.192 threads and 64 TB RAM. It can tackle the largest business workloads. Nobody else can, POWER8 can not, x86 can not.