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List:       opensolaris-discuss
Subject:    Re: [osol-discuss] AMD Shares up on Oracle Takeover Buzz
From:       Gary <gdriggs () gmail ! com>
Date:       2010-09-27 18:22:52
Message-ID: AANLkTikVpiw74tjg10QXrMCTVjKWMgKtgooFdqWV3w_J () mail ! gmail ! com
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On 9/27/10, Orvar Korvar wrote:

> So, 192GB/sec is probably not true and I am very sceptical to that figure.

And yet, ironically, despite your doubts about their technical claims
you are still clinging to a statement made by a single person at IBM
seven years ago that they plan to discontinue AIX in favor of Linux.
Yet I haven't seen any large push of resources in to Linux dev work by
way of proprietary drivers, etc. that would expand their compatibility
of Linux on their current RISC hardware line. One might expect to see
a lot more of that if they've spent the last seven years preparing to
abandon AIX.

> I know x86 can not match that. But the gap is decreasing fast. Look at the
> trend and extrapolate.

The trend is the same as it was several years ago -- AMD & Intel
continue to try to outpace each other by way of multiple cores,
reduced line width and die sizes, etc but they aren't trying to
recreate existing RISC architectures because they're both having a
hard enough time competing in the niche they're already in. Meanwhile,
Intel is distracted by their various mobile initiatives when they've
already lost that market to ARM, MIPS, et al. So all I see are big,
lumbering bureaucracies that are too busy innovating in their
respective mid-level markets to compete effectively in the high end.
But suggesting this game is all resting on the shoulders of the CPU
manufacturers is absurd to begin with. SGI is one of a handful of
server vendors that's innovating in the x86-64 architecture. Perhaps
there's a reason that IBM and Oracle's high end hardware is still RISC
instead of CISC...?

On the other hand, Oracle's Exadata and Exalogic systems use Intel
Xeon CPUs but one of those was started before their acquisition of
Sun. But again, the innovation there is not in CPUs alone.

-Gary
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