I seriously doubt that IBM will toss its POWER division out the door. They make 
too much money from it through software and support sales for Linux, AIX, 
AS/400, and MVS/VSE/VM. It's the base of their money making software and 
services. Sure they make a ton more money from their Global Services division, 
where they'll sell you even a Sun box if you want it and manage it for you. 


Oracle is heavily investing in SPARC. And if you payed attention this week the 
SPARC-T3 processor is blowing away the competition in on real-world benchmarks 
using Oracle software (middleware->database). There are plenty of benchmarks 
showing that the SPARC-T3 4 (4 socket box) blows away or is equivalent to a 4 
socket POWER 7 box! So Oracle has pretty much caught up to IBM and at a lower 
cost.. SURPRISE!! 


If Oracle were to get into the chip making business it's more likely they'll 
look at someone who can manufacture integrated ASICS (think I/O, 
virtualization, 
storage, etc.) than to get into the x86 business. Sure if they bought out AMD, 
Oracle would shake up that company hands down and turn it around. But remember 
they'd have to buy Foundary to get the actual chip fabs and that's where AMD 
has 
been goofing up. I was really hoping back in the day that Sun and AMD would 
merge, but instead it bought STK. While x86 chips are typically faster and 
cheaper, they lack the RAS, I/O, linear scaling, and integrated hypervisor 
features of SPARC and POWER. This is why you don't see x86 boxes with large 
number of CPU sockets or PCI-E slots, they can't handle it. This is why all the 
major benchmarks are won by the big-iron still to this day and why big 
companies 
still buy SPARC and POWER.

The day that x86 servers can compete on the all of those features, is the day 
that RISC is in serious trouble. But considering the amount of money that Sun 
Oracle and IBM are pouring into their RISC platforms, and the fact that Intel 
can't build a fully integrated architecture, it's going to be some time. And if 
Sun Oracle and IBM can continue to crank up the performance, they may over take 
Intel in single-thread performance and clock speed which will silence the nay 
sayers. SPARC and POWER already beat x86 on multi-core and mult-threading 
technology. If you pay attention to the features that Intel is after it's still 
consumer market centric (integrated graphics and gaming). RISC servers are 
getting denser not only with cores/threads, but also with memory, I/O, size, 
etc. A good example is to compare a SPARC-T3 4 and a x4800 server, same 
chassis, 
but you'll see where x86 sucks.. heat/power which impacts the feature set. 


If Oracle wants to buy a chip maker, they should buy someone like Emulex or 
Qlogic for Infiniband ASICs and make that the future I/O backplane for all Sun 
Oracle servers. If Oracle were to leapfrog past 10GbE and make integrated 
stacks 
like it did with ExaData and ExaLogic across it's product line, they could do a 
lot of damage against the competition.


 *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Octave J. Orgeron
Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant
Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com
E-Mail: unixcons...@yahoo.com
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----- Original Message ----
From: Gary Driggs <gdri...@gmail.com>
To: "opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org" <opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org>
Sent: Sun, September 26, 2010 10:42:44 AM
Subject: Re: [osol-discuss] AMD Shares up on Oracle Takeover Buzz

On Sep 26, 2010, at 2:31 AM, Orvar Korvar wrote:

> As IBM has officially stated that they are going to phase out AIX in favour 
> of 
>Linux, it probably makes sense to sell off POWER.

It's been seven years since they said they were going to discontinue AIX. 
Regardless, I find it highly unlikely they'd want to do anything other than 
spin 
off their CPU division in to a separate company a la Freescale. That, too, 
seems 
highly unlikely since every video game console on the market right now is 
running one or more IBM processors.

> x86 is catching up fast and within some generations, x86 will be faster than 
>POWER. When that happens, IBM will probably sell of POWER, kill AIX and switch 
>to Linux 100%.

And when pigs learn to fly, Santa will put his reindeer out to pasture to 
become 
a swineherd. ;)

-Gary
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