Sun spots

Gregory Alan Bolcer (gbolcer@gambetta.ICS.uci.edu)
Wed, 05 Aug 1998 15:04:30 -0700


Two pieces of Sun news today. My answer to both of them:
When hell freezes over(**).

Sun Microsystems (SUNW) rose 2 1/2 to 48 as a new agreement
to cooperate with IBM on some software development renewed
**speculation that IBM is considering a takeover of the Silicon
Valley networking company**. The two companies are involved in a
joint venture to create a business computer operating system
based on the Sun-developed Java language.

It's hard to imagine a company as large as IBM having the ability
to buy a company as large as Sun.

**Sun is promising UltraSPARC V, code-named Millenium, for
volume shipment in the first quarter of the year 2000.**
Sun claims the new chip will be faster than Intel Corp's
Merced, Silicon Graphics Inc.'s R12000, and two unnanounced chips--
a PowerPC chip from IBM Corp. code-named Boxer; and the 21364 Alpha
chip from Compaq Computer Corp....In a recent presentation to
resellers, Sun claimed UltraSPARC V will run at 1,000MHz with
a 64KB/16MB cache, integer vs. floating point of approximately
90/110, and 4.2 instructions per cycle.

They can't even get the UltraSPARC III's shipping this summer like
the promised, much less the IV's next Summer and they are predicting
this 2 years out? Ridiculous. My bet is that either IBM or Samsung
(who had the first 800Mhz Alpha and they are going to the .25 micron
format 18 months ahead of what Digital was doing) delivers the
first Gigahertz chip. SGI isn't even competing as they
are phasing out their MIPS line, so their plans for high performance
processors has been incredibly scaled back. I am laughing about
the swipe at Merced. It's like shadowboxing.

Greg