First Rate Analysis - 27th interesting

This is first-rate and illuminating analysis, thanks Timothy. 27th January will be most interesting, though the Apple webathon may be a bit shorter and easier to get through!

Warmly,

Best,

Ivan Hallworth

A chalenge for Sparc T

Looking back in 2002 Sun’s Summit on which Scott McNealy promised to make a 32 times faster CPU and the whole story of Coolthreads and Sparc T after that, I have to admit that for Oracle it will be a challenge to put the next architecture on the right rails.

From the beginning, Sparc T was advertised as the best choice for frontend systems (btw, it is absolutely true by the nature of CMT technology) and was targeted to ISPs. The implementation of Logical Domains was an attempt to compete with virtualization available on Intel and AMD platforms, but the single thread performance of Sparc T limits the application of LDoms to something similar to a hosting on ISP side, so it seems that the idea was very questionable. Later on, Sun tried to resolve thread performance with “a transactional memory” enchantment on Rock, but unfortunately, the platform was canceled.

With SUN, Oracle is acquiring the field with the variety of modern and legacy platforms which been built on Sparc, Intel, AMD or Fujitsu CPU. The filed has been waiting some solid roadmap for next 3-5 years from last April and that is the challenge.