http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/09/sun_kills_us5/ Does this signal the beginning of the end of the Sparc line? I think
maybe it does. I can imagine Fujitsu chips filling in the Sparc high-end
for a bit, but i suspect AMD64, IBM's POWER chips and [unfortunately]
Intel's offering[s] will be the sole competitors on the market in a few
years. It seems that Sun's chip development will be focused on bringing
together some of the stuff in Niagra and Rock which will presumably be
focused on multi-core lower-performance than the high end SMP stuff that
UltraSPARC used to be.
And if this all changes where does the future lie? Given time will
Solaris become non-sparc focused? Where does the line get drawn - when
Sun contributes stuff to Linux and ends up focusing on that? To some
extent it seems to me to be a question of where the line gets drawn and
how to draw it - how do Sun stop the gradual slide - in fact, should they
stop it? This news and the Microsoft stuff may be the best business
sense, but it threatens to take away some of what makes Sun what they are
and in my view a world without that would be a poorer world. Perhaps a
market niche or area of some sort of realy top-quality support and work
could be found, but i fear that Sun as we know it may be dissapearing.
This is particularly a shame as i have been more excited than for a long
time with things like Project Looking Glass and some of the Solaris 10
features coming soon.
What does anybody else think?
All the best
Ade
