On 5/28/2012 11:39 AM, Robar Philip wrote:
On May 28, 2012, at 4:47 AM, Erik Trimble<[email protected]> wrote:
On 5/27/2012 10:18 AM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
On Sat, 26 May 2012, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
Does Oracle own "SPARC", or just the only company doing SPARC designs? (Have
Fujitsu pulled out entirely of the SPARC space?)
Obviously, Fujitsu has *not* pulled out of the SPARC space. They have been
designing new interesting SPARC CPUs and last I checked (couple of months ago),
the fastest computer in the world uses SPARC CPUs.
Sun hardware ‘blows,’ according to Oracle internal documents:
http://www.itworld.com/hardware/278842/sun-hardware-blows-according-oracle-internal-documents
Yeah, that's been known for a long time, that producing a SPARC chip
that can directly compete with AMD/Intel in terms of single-threaded (or
even low-multi-thread-count) performance hasn't been possible. The
SPARC64 series that powers the M-class was a significant disappointment
in terms of raw compute power, and both the UltraSparc V and VI got
canceled mostly due to the inability of the design teams to produce
reasonable performance out of those designs.
The T1 chip was, frankly, more of a "proof-of-concept" thing, and did
have significant problems, even in the target market niche. The T2
pretty much solved those, though, and, given the intended uses for the
T2, is a *very* solid performer. I can't speak to how well the T3 and
T4 do (the T3 seems to underperform again, and the T4 looks sweet, but
that's from limited exposure) in the general market, since they're
pretty much gone from general-purpose computing (i.e. they really only
power Oracle's appliances).
The T-series is a winner, though, assuming one abides by the limitations
that it espouses. I've seen a T2+ (dual-socket) blow the doors off a
quad-socket Xeon that cost four times as much, and also which uses a
ridiculously larger power draw.
Like I said at the beginning of this thread: the T2 and any possible
successors have a valid market niche where they can be very successful.
IMNSHO, that niche happens to overlap considerably with IllumOS-based
distros, and it would be a shame for either the SPARC chip design to
simply die, or to see IllumOS distros abandon it completely.
-Erik
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