RE: Dan JOhnson & David Halko
"s he for real?...." Actually, no, I'm just a voice in your head. You'd best go book a session with the shrink, otherwise I might stay in here and really make you suffer....
"....Does he actually have a job?...." Well, as voices in your head go, I have a very good job, thanks, though it is very echoey in here what with the large amounts of empty space
".....I certainly wouldn't have time to post so many long rants....." Well, it doesn't take five minutes to formulate replies to the pointless FUD posted by you and your fellow Sunshiners. After all, I'm in your head, I see your fear, and I already know when you're lying.....
/psych off.
"....No doubt about it, Itanium is in serious trouble....." Yeah, being the number one chip in the lucrative UNIX high-end is such a pain.
"....Intel has said that all the money made on Itanium so far has been reinvested into the development of next versions....." Really? I've never heard anything of the sort. But then at least Intel has the money to put into development, whereas Sun's dwindling reserves and continual losses means Sun doesn't have the money to invest in any development for long, hence their desperation to get Slowaris supported by other server vendors before they have to pink slip the whole Sun hardware organistaion.
".....Sales of Itanium are too low to justify anything after Tukwila, so Intel is going to have to dump the chip...." Now what have we told you Sunshiners about how just because you wish it was so it doesn't make it happen? Intel has the winning hand, it has Xeon cleaning up in the low-to-mid server bizz and Itanium for everything above that, so it makes strategic sense for Intel to maintain Itanium too keep the pressure on IBM (they don't have to worry about Sun anymore). Itanium is the only option to Power and IBM's mainframes, areas Intel would dearly like to feast on, and only Itanium gets them up there. Nehalem will be very good, but still not good enough to take on Power. The high-end has become a two-horse race and neither horse is Sun's.
"....But if customers are faced with a dead-end processor after having invested big bucks into new Superdomes, HP can kiss the high-end UNIX market goodbye....." But seeing as Superdome sales are growing, and hp is dominating the high-end UNIX space, it would seem hp don't have to worry at all. Face it - as Rock, if it ever arrives, can only scale to eight sockets, leaving Sun reliant on the uncertain future of SPARC64 in the M-series servers, Sun has kissed goodbye to the high-end for good. And the announcement that Slowairs will be sold on hp ProLiant means Sun has just kissed goodbye to the low-to-mid-end server bizz too. Like I warned you a while back, you better start learning Linux fast!
RE: David Halko
"....because that is not what was being contested, Jesper....." No, you said Slowaris was fastest all the time in all situations, and then posted a load of cherrypicked, out-of-date and invalid benchmark results, which Jesper then showed up nicely.
"....There was a FUD statement, that was clearly wrong, and I demonstrated it. That was the point....." No, you merely showed for a fact that Sun can't compete on performance anymore, and hasn't been able for a while, as shown by Jesper's figures and my own posts.
"....With Integer and floating point, 1 year older Niagra is a little behind. Niagra is still clearly competitive, and is not "being trashed (like everyone else)"....." Naiagara lags today's Xeon on performance and is massively more expensive, so it is most certainly uncompetitive.
"....The Intel Core i7 is a nice chip, it has it's problems with some architecture aspects with throughput, but it is still a nice chip. Niagra has problems with single threaded applications, but it is still a nice chip....." Yes, but businesses don't base decisions on "niceness", they want the best performance with the best reliability for the lowest price, and that means Niagara is dead in anything other than the webserving niche.
"....Really, that is OK, since SUN sells Intel based platforms....." If Ponytail or the customers had any faith in the Galaxy range then Sun wouldn't be so desperate to sign up hp's ProLiant. The truth is Galaxy is like the rest of Sun's products - a limited range with poor features, limited management tools and from a limited range of unintegrated products. Sun just outsourced their Xeon server business to hp, IBM and Dell because those vendors have real integrated x64 ranges with a future.
"....This does not demonstrate a problem for open vendors like SUN, where they are now CPU agnostic. All their software runs on multiple architectures....." All their software in binarily incompatible from one platform to the next. This triples the expense of developing for Slowaris, which is why developers will simply take the easy path of developing for the larger Linux base first and then making the simple port to Slowaris x64. Most won't bother making three different SPARC binaries for Niagara, Rock and SPARC64 (well, Rock is dead so they actually won't bother to make the other two). So again, Slowaris will lag the real open product, Linux.
"....People just have to just get away from all the bigotry and just enjoy the benefits of innovation that various vendors bring to the marketplace!" Cough*kettle*cough. Well, you enjoy your Sunshiner fantasy, just don't expect the rest of us in the real world to fall in step.