16 Core Processor from Sun

Published on June 24th, 2008

Posted by John C Dvorak in General

167 redundant news articles about Bill Gates quitting Microsoft. Cripes, how boring.
Comscore tumbles on Google news.
ICANN fooling around with the TLD’s again.
Contradictory stories abound. I check out a few.
Microsoft pledges XP support through 2014.
SUN doing a nifty 16-core processor.
Larry Lessig pushing broadband initiative.
Germans ban the G-mail name. You have to do a workaround.
Yahoo-Google deal triggering hearings.
Kodak buying back its shares.

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9 users responded in " 16 Core Processor from Sun "

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# 1 Jim in Seattle said, on June 24th, 2008 at 5:24 pm

Why do you have such a hard on for Bill Gates? The guy is stepping down because he knows it’s time to go. There’s a great week-long series on The Seattle Times Web site about his legacy. True, he may have been (and still is) a geek, but he and his wife have a family, he has recognized the need to step aside for Microsoft to move forward (Ray Ozzie is going to be great) and will concentrate on his foundation—and actually make a difference in the deepest, darkest, poorest places in the world. Now that he may have more free time, maybe he’ll come on Cranky Geeks when he’s in San Fran? All he can say is “no.”

# 2 QB said, on June 24th, 2008 at 5:56 pm

Sun is back on the Niagara bandwagon looking for cheap scaling across federated cores. For example, I saw an internal demo of MySql running fully parallel on 20 chips with 80 cores total. They’ve also been beefing up the Solaris JDK (and Glassfish) to take full advantage of multicore, specifically on Niagara. Threading has always been “OK” on Java.

The core/processor engineers have been doing amazing stuff (for cheap) over the last three years and now they’re trying to get their software and OS teams to catch up.

They’re looking for places that have big Java problems to solve and could take advantage of it. For example, hugely successful startups like LinkedIn or Facebook are pushing all sorts of boundaries that Sun thinks they can solve. Banks, insurance, airlines, etailers, etc all have these problems. Also it saves $$ on electricity which is kind of a small rage these days in IT organizations. IT Governance and Management is suddenly “green” – or at least this year since SOX is so boring.

# 3 QB said, on June 24th, 2008 at 5:59 pm

#1: Ray Ozzie is going to be great

I think Ray Ozzie is a pretty smart and nice guy. He also hasn’t delivered anything major for quite a while, but things can always change. The problem in Ballmer, he crushes any creativity and initiative in that company.

The other guy to keep an eye on at MS is Scott Guthrie. I think he could be the “next BG”.

# 4 James Hill said, on June 24th, 2008 at 6:03 pm

The guy behind Lotus Notes is going to save M$? LMAO!

# 5 Jim in Seattle said, on June 24th, 2008 at 6:04 pm

Re: Steve Ballmer. He’s announced he’s leaving in 10 years. Sounds like a long time, but it’s not. He’s the biz guy; Ozzie will create an environment for creativity and innovation while Ballmer goes out and sells it, IMO.

# 6 QB said, on June 24th, 2008 at 6:15 pm

#5 Ballmer is causing a bleed in many of their core groups and even MS Research. I think Ozzie is good but he will have trouble pushing Ballmer when they need to take a chance.

I think it’ll be interesting to see how many people leave this year after the stock vests in September.

# 7 pjakobs said, on June 25th, 2008 at 5:41 am

well… the thing with those Sun T2 processors is that they are great for Software that uses multithreading really well like web servers etc. but really poor for software that needs single thread performance. They really are specialists of their own kind and I know many Sun customers who are looking for alternatives since Sun has no decent offering with powerful single thread, or at least not massively parallel performance. There they just loose badly.

# 8 Angel H. Wong said, on June 25th, 2008 at 9:31 am

I’m impressed, not mac fan doing the “barely enough to run Vista” joke.

Maybe those two trojan horses (http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=18715) managed to shut them up.

# 9 kjackman said, on June 25th, 2008 at 1:15 pm

Wow, the Sun, bringer of life and precious energy… is there anything it can’t do?

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