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Suns Rock is pretty cool hardware too - a machine with the
potential to side step the scaling issues that have traditionally
limited SMP system expansion. As I understand it, the Rock hardware is
sufficiently backward compatible that existing Solaris binaries for
SPARC work - but the big potential gains wont be realized without
significant kernel, library, and application simplification.
IBMs cell is a grid on a chip - and offers both the performance
potential and the programming complexities youd expect from a typical
Altivec equipped PPC grid reduced from rack scale to 45 nanometers.
The cell hardware really is insanely great: it works, it runs Linux,
you can gang up as many of the things as you want, and the second
generation removes the earlier limitations on fast floating point
precision. The bottom line is simple: if IBM can make a decision and
get the software out the door, its a world beater.
Sadly, however, IBM cant seem to make a decision - many of its
customers are 360 class people - and theyre apparently still having
more than a little trouble getting the software past about 40%
computational efficiency - and thats with ideal applications.
Suns Rock is pretty cool hardware too - a machine with the
potential to side step the scaling issues that have traditionally
limited SMP system expansion. As I understand it, the Rock hardware is
sufficiently backward compatible that existing Solaris binaries for
SPARC work - but the big potential gains wont be realized without
significant kernel, library, and application simplification.
Rock has recently been delayed until mid to late 2009 - mainly, Im
told, because Sun cant keep up with T1/T2 demand, the APL line is
selling well, and there are lots of good reasons for wanting to bundle
the new hardware with matching OS and application upgrades that simply
arent ready yet. (Ive also been told that production capacity at TI
is limited and some people at Sun simply wont consider contracting
manufacturing to IBM - but I have no independent reports on which to
assess the credibility of the claim.)
But what about Wintel and x86? If Linux continues to evolve as
everyones preferred solution for grid computing and IBM shifts much of
the focus there to PPC and Cell - while Sun rocks the SMP world with
highly scalable solutions built on Solaris, then where does all that
leave Windows and x86?
As technology these are nowhere now - and I read Intels road map as
promising only to continue using its manufacturing muscle to produce
re-invented renditions of AMD technologies at smaller scales to achieve
higher cycle speeds at lower power usage than AMD can. Microsoft,
meanwhile, is distracted by acquisitions, hostage to Windows, and
internally unable to escape the limitations of its own x86 programming
investment.
Personally I think Microsoft will eventually bite the bullet,
release Office for Xenon, and start down the path to PPC with OpenBSD
as the obvious replacement technology for its own network OS efforts.
That guess, however, is driven from technical, not marketing,
considerations - and if you know about the law of unexpected
consequences you wont be surprised to discover that Suns Rock
technologies have the potential for just such an unexpected consequence
for x86.
Specifically, Rocks transactional memory has to potential to
eliminate most of the complexities associated with programming for
multi-threaded, concurrent execution, environments - making an 8-way,
256 thread, UltraSPARC SMP machine look, to the programmer, nearly
indistinguishable from a single user, single threaded, x86 machine.
If so, the bottom line may be that Rocks transactional memory
effectively provides both C and low end x86 with strong end of life
kickers - thanklessly extending x86 mass hegemony, and thus the
Windows/Linux kernel wars, into another generation and leaving IBM as
the sole heir to the complexities of parallel programming.
Read the original article: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=1076
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