I agree that 'commodity' hardware will generally succeed. But, not always, and there are niches worth exploiting. For example, you mentioned PowerPC, and PowerPC in fact does well... on consoles. Which is a market worth being in.
A top-to-bottom solution - Oracle hardware, Oracle OS, Oracle middleware, Oracle DB - will have its place. It'll be a small, but lucrative part of the market. Oracle will at the same time not ignore the bigger market, including Linux. That's my guess.
Posted Apr 21, 2009 12:00 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
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> I agree that 'commodity' hardware will generally succeed. But, not always, and there are niches worth exploiting.
A few other non-x86 hardware "niches" are doing not too bad: think for instance GPUs or mobile phone processors (more units sold than x86).
Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun
Posted Apr 21, 2009 16:45 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
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Maybe I wasn't explicit enough about "if you care about performance..."
Obviously ARM, Mips and PowerPC are doing wonderfully in engine computers, industrial control, mobile phones, access points, etc. Why? Because generally the most important factor is power consumption or ruggednes, not raw horsepower. It makes perfect sense to use custom silicon in these applications.
Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun
Posted Apr 21, 2009 20:51 UTC (Tue) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047)
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POWER/PowerPC also sees a lot of use on high-performance supercomputers. BlueGene/L, for instance, uses POWER5 processors on its compute nodes.
Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun
Posted Apr 22, 2009 0:15 UTC (Wed) by leoc (subscriber, #39773)
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And don't forget video game systems. Every Wii, Playstation 3, and XBOX 360 have a PowerPC based CPU inside.
Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun
Posted Apr 22, 2009 4:08 UTC (Wed) by ebs (guest, #30411)
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No, BlueGene/L uses PowerPC 440-based chips, not Power5