Sure keb...
"I certainly dont agree with you. I mean, IBM offerings has scaling problems and does not scale as well as Solaris (TPC-C, AIX scaling was rewritten to handle P795 with a measly 256 cores)."
Ehh ? What the f word are you talking about. The POWER server platform actually has good scaling. Well at least compared to anything Oracle can muster.
Lets have a look at perhaps the easiest scalable benchmark SPECINTrate2006.
Here going from 128 cores to 256 cores the new SPARC64+ based M9000 has a scaling factor of 91.6% compared to an ideal x2, now the POWER 795 going all the way from the 32 cores to 256 cores has a scaling factor of 98.7%.
But we can of cause also look at pure raw performance numbers, the 256 core M9000 with the 2.88 GHz SPARC VII on SAP2Tier does 175,600 SAPS, the POWER 795 does 688,630 SAPS. I mean even the 64 core POWER 780 does 202,180 SAPS.
Come on... Don't throw stones when you live in a glass house filled with china.
"IBM AIX is copying Solaris DTrace and renaming it Probevue."
Well, just cause others are doing neat stuff doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it yourself.
"IBM for many years trash talked Sun Niagara and said that 1-2 cores at high clock speed such as 5-6GHz is the future, because data bases like strong cores. To use many cores at lower speeds is just a bad idea, said IBM. One strong core is the future. "
You do know that POWER have managed to do all three things. Put more cores on a chip AND increase the per core throughput and socket throughput.
SPECJBB2005 for example:
POWER 780 with 8 chips and 64 POWER7 cores@3.86 GHz does 5,087,469 BOBS.
POWER 595 with 32 chips and 64 POWER6 cores@5.00 GHz does 3,435,485 BOBS.
That is a difference of 48% per core throughput.
and lets have a look at SPECINT2006rate
POWER 780 with 8 chips and 64 POWER7 cores@3.86 GHz does 2740
POWER 595 with 32 chips and 64 POWER6 cores@5.00 GHz does 2160
that is a difference in 27% in per core throughput.
And it not even with the highest clocked POWER7.
Again you have absolutely no clue what so ever.
"And now today POWER7 does not have 1 core at 8-9GHz, but instead it has many lower clocked cores, just like Niagara. Sun realized that GHz race will shift to many core race, but IBM did not understand that until POWER7. POWER6 was 5GHz and 2 cores. POWER7 is not 6-7GHz and 1-2 cores. So, the future is not 1-2 strong cores. Back in the Sun days, 8 cores in a cpu was just crazy, no one had that, except Sun. Today Oracle aim for 512 threads in one cpu, which is crazy today. But tomorrow everyone will have it. IBM will copy that many threads too."
Eh.. again with your GHz.. you sound like a IBM Mainframe sales guy.
And you don't get it again, in servers it's about having as good as possible combination of per thread, core and per socket throughput.
And to be quite blunt SUN/Oracle have in recent years failed being in the top pack with more than one of these at the same time. POWER on the other hand have managed to increase all three things: the per core, per thread, per chip and per socket throughput from generation to generation.
And you seriously need a history lesson. Cause you do seem to totally ignore facts.
Now comparing SPARC and POWER history wise.
More than one core per chip.
2001 POWER4 2 cores per chip
2005 Xenon 3 cores per chip.
2006 Cell 1+8 cores per chip
2007 BlueGene/P chip 4 cores per chip
2010 POWER7 chip 8 cores per chip.
2004 UltraSPARC IV 2 cores per chip.
2005 UltraSPARC T1 8 cores per chip.
2007 SPARC64 VI 2 cores per chip.
2008 SPARC64 VII 4 cores per chip
2009 SPARC64 VIIIfx 8 cores per chip
2010 SPARC T3 16 cores per chip
More than one chip per socket.
2001 POWER4 MCM modules for the p690 resulting in 4 chips/8 cores/8 threads per socket.
2004 POWER5 MCM modules for the p595 resulting in 4 chips / 8 cores per/16 threads socket.
2005 POWER5+ QCM modules for the p520/550/560 resulting in 2 chips/4 cores/8 threads per socket
2011 POWER7 MCM modules for the POWER 775 resulting in 4 chips/32 cores/128 threads per socket
SUN/Oracle doesn't have/use this technology.
Multithreading:
2000 RS64 IV implemented 2 way Coarse Grained MultiThreading.
2004 POWER5 implemented 2 way Simultaneous MultiThreading.
2010 POWER7 implemented 4 way Simultaneous MultiThreading.
2005 UltraSPARC T1 implemented 4 way Fine Grained MultiThreading.
2007 UltraSPARC T2 implemented 8 way Fine Grained MultiThreading.
2007 SPARC64 VI implemented 2 way Coars Grained MultiThreading.
2008 SPARC64 VI implemented 2 way Simultaneous MultiThreading.
Do I really need to say more ?
"And for instance Solaris ZFS, I dont know of any IBM storage solution that protects your data as well as ZFS does. It would not surprise me if IBM copy ZFS too, soon."
I think the guy that put this best was Linus, when he asked why does a filesystem have to do that ?
And cool as it is.. I have to say I agree with Linus, this is perhaps taking the role of the filesystem one step to far.
As for putting computers into a container... well... I would hardly call that innovation. We have them.. it's stupid in most cases IMHO, but as a hack to have variable capacity that you can move from location to location it's ok.
"etc etc etc."
So that is basically your argument ? You couldn't
"What techniques has IBM created, that Solaris copied? You talk about "recent years". Can you give an example?"
You have to be kidding ? You forget that IBM is a hundred year old company that pretty much invented the Computer Industry together with companies like NCR, Xerox, bell labs ... and later DEC and ...
And to be honest Oracle (SUN) is kind of new in that perspective. So what about.....
The RISC processor ?
The hard disk ?
The tape drive ?
Logical Volume Manager.
journalised filesystem.
Software package management system.
Solaris Jumpstart (AIX NIM)
And as far as I understand Solaris 11 will kind of start to use a ODM system like the one found in AIX.
The Hypervisor used on the T series ?
All due respect to Oracle (SUN), but they are not one of the inventors of the computer business, they will always have to build on stuff made by others, simply cause they are a much younger company.
And the rest is just your normal B******, I think people are pretty tired of hearing it. I mean even 'serious' IT people who really dig Solaris and SPARC (and there are a lot of those) are distancing them from you. Perhaps U need to find a new tune to play.
// jesper