Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 6:17 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
In reply to: Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun by shieldsd
Parent article: Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Won't happen. It's been proven time and time again since the 80s: it's all about process. If you care about performance, you must go with the high-volume, off the shelf CPU. Apple learned it with PowerPC, Intel/HP learned it with Itanium, and Sun has learned it multiple times over. We'll see if Larrabee and Cell can buck this trend but they're looking pretty weak so far.

Let's say you're Sun, you want a fast server chip, and you willing to give up single-core speed (what everyone else wants) to go massively multicore. You like the differentiation so you burn a ton of engineer time creating a custom chip and all the infrastructure that goes along with it.

Once you're shipping, you'll find that Intel has already smoked you. Happens every time. They just take a rusty, decades-old design, update it, shrink it, and fab it on a process you won't be able to use for years. And now their $400 chip blows the doors off your custom $1600 silicon for all but the most synthetic workloads.

I agree, we'll see servers become far more specialized to host modern workloads more efficiently. But, when it happens, the successful products will be x86 based. Alas.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 9:15 UTC (Tue) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281) [Link] (5 responses)

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.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 12:00 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (4 responses)

> 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) [Link] (3 responses)

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) [Link] (2 responses)

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 (guest, #39773) [Link]

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) [Link]

No, BlueGene/L uses PowerPC 440-based chips, not Power5

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 10:17 UTC (Tue) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] (1 responses)

Apple learned it with PowerPC, Intel/HP learned it with Itanium, and Sun has learned it multiple times over. We'll see if Larrabee and Cell can buck this trend but they're looking pretty weak so far.

Never leave Big Blue out of the analysis. ;-)

Oracle is not selling a general purpose system, and my guess is that they will not miss this opportunity to shape an OS to the needs of its flagship product. They must be dreaming of selling and servicing the datacenter-in-a-box, and obviously, IBM is the big competitor here. But I don't think Oracle care as much about the box as IBM does: they will not even try to beat IBM with better and faster processors. If they keep Sun's hardware division, it will be for integration purposes, not differentiation.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 23, 2009 19:22 UTC (Thu) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link]

> it will be for integration purposes, not differentiation.

That may be the calculus of the thing.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 13:02 UTC (Tue) by gouyou (guest, #30290) [Link] (1 responses)

If you care about performance, you must go with the high-volume, off the shelf CPU.

That explains the success of a number of FPGA solutions ... A generic CPU is good for generic tasks but using dedicated hardware can really accelerate some workloads.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 15:42 UTC (Tue) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link]

FPGA is anything but dedicated hardware... It's as generic as it gets.
It's the high-volume, off the shelf replacement for "dedicated" hardware.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 23, 2009 13:18 UTC (Thu) by davecb (subscriber, #1574) [Link] (2 responses)

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

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 23, 2009 17:28 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

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
and Power were merely goads to Intel, showing
them a mid-range and high-end that they
couldn't achieve. AMD is a punch straight to
the eye (;-))

--dave