Posts by Joel Storm 7 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2008
Here's a pointer to the San Francisco Chronicle's review of "Chinese Democracy" (note that the editor has broken the one line URL into two lines):
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/23/PKIA14409I.DTL&hw=chinese+democracy+review&sn=002&sc=520
I think most Register readers will enjoy the style of the review. I especially like the Barry Manilow bit.
The story says both:
"It has just reported a quarterly loss of $1.7bn for its first fiscal 2009 quarter."
And:
"analysts are expecting Sun to lose $1.35bn on revenues of $12.8bn for its fiscal 2009 year,"
First, if Sun has already lost $1.7bn in the first fiscal quarter and the analysts expect the loses for the fiscal year to be $1.35bn, doesn't that say the analysts expect Sun to make $0.35bn in the next three quarters? I guess they could mean lose another $1.35bn in the year, but that's not what is says.
Second, $1.4bn of the $1.7bn first quarter loss was goodwill write downs and other non-cash stuff. That's a bit different from real cash money losses. From Sun's investor relations site:
"On a non-GAAP basis, net loss for the first quarter of fiscal 2009 was $65 million..."
"Sun ended the quarter with a cash and marketable debt securities balance of $3.121 billion and generated cash flow from operations for the first quarter of fiscal 2009 of $148 million. "
So, they "lost" $1.7bn but ended up the quarter with $148 million more than they started with. This kind of thing isn't at all unusual with the GAAP and accounting rules.
Finally, a couple years ago Sun said they'd reach a 10% operating margin by fiscal 2009 (I think). For a while they were on or ahead of that plan. I personally think the current problems are more a result of external influence, like the sub-prime mortgage financial collapse, than anything Sun management messed up. It's not like Sun is the only tech company whose stock has tanked this year.
Also, the market cap number is nice and all, but you have to convince over %50 percent of the shareholders to sell in order to actually buy a company. I think it's unlikely that %50 percent of Sun stock holders would be happy to sell their shares at $4. I bought some earlier this year and If I can't sell them in the $15 to $20 range, I'm just going to keep them for awhile. I currently don't seem to have any gains I could use losses to balance out.
This would best be explained in a half hour with a whiteboard to draw pictures on. But here goes anyway: I suspect the confusion has to do with not everyone understanding the difference between course grained and fine grained multithreading. Course grained (like Intel HyperThreading I think) is basically a hardware context switching mechanism. The threads are switched at the start and end of the instruction pipeline. So the entire pipeline is running thread A or thread B but never both. The T1, T2, T2+ chips use a fine grained approach where each stage of the pipeline can be running a different thread. So, the instruction decoder can be working on a thread A instruction, while an address is being generated for thread B, and an XOR operation is being done for thread C, etc. All during the same clock cycle. So, when things line up nicely, you do get 128 threads all executing at the same time on the new 2 way T2+ boxes.
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