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Oracle: SELECT * FROM SunOracle: SELECT * FROM SunPosted Apr 23, 2009 13:18 UTC (Thu) by davecb (subscriber, #1574)In reply to: Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun by bronson Parent article: Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun
Actually Intel is close to a monoculture, and without AMD, IBM and Sun, would wander off into dark corners like the the IAPX432 (shudder) and Itanium (unobtanium?), without a presence in the 64-socket-and-above space where Oracle sells a lot of product. Right now, if you want a big box to run something like eBay or PayPal on, you buy Sun SPARC or IBM Power chips. In the future, I speculate you'll see AMD competing in the NUMA space with 32- and 64-socket systems, implementing the heaviest-used subset of the x86-64instruction set and faulting to emulate the leftover dreck (;-)) --dave
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Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun Posted Apr 23, 2009 17:28 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
This is a very good point. Without the competition from AMD, we'd probably still be waiting for the hardware virtualization and 64bit extensions. I'm pretty sure Intel wanted to use 64bit as an opportunity to move its customers to a more patent-protected architecture. Way to go AMD!
Not sure Sparc has really motivated Intel much...? Every Sparc I've ever used has been large, hot, and slow for real-world workloads. But maybe I'm just scarred from having to lug around a Tadpole for a year.
Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun Posted Apr 23, 2009 18:17 UTC (Thu) by davecb (subscriber, #1574) [Link]
Ironic: I used a Tadpole until last fall, when I
blew the screen.
I think it's probably fair to say that SPARC
--dave
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