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Sun Microsystems may have dropped a bit of weight by the time Oracle officially acquires the company.
According to two people briefed on Sun’s plans, the company has
canceled its Rock chip project, putting an end to one of its biggest
revitalization bets.
Sun has been working on the Rock project for more than five years,
hoping to create a chip with many cores that would trounce competing
server chips from I.B.M. and Intel. The company has talked about Rock
in the loftiest of terms and built it up as a game-changing product. In
April 2007, Jonathan Schwartz, the chief executive of Sun, bragged about receiving the first test versions of Rock.
But the two people familiar with Sun’s plans say Rock has met with
an unceremonious end. The people requested anonymity, as they are not
authorized to speak with the press about Sun’s plans.
Michelle Parkinson, a Sun spokeswoman, said the company had no comment.
Rock was at one point scheduled to ship last year, but Sun has
delayed it a number of times, and over the past few months company
insiders have complained about various glitches hurting the product.
This marks the second high-end chip in a row that Sun has canceled
before its release. These types of products cost billions of dollars to
produce, and Sun now has about a 10-year track record of investing in
game-changing chips that failed to materialize.
Sun has been relying on chips from Fujitsu for its larger servers
while it waited for the Rock development to be finished. Now it is
likely to just continue using Fujitsu chips, which should lower
research and development costs. That’s probably good news for Oracle,
which is in the process of acquiring Sun.
Sun does still design a line of chips for its smaller servers, and those products have proved popular in recent years.
Read the original article: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/sun-is-said-to-cancel-big-chip-project/
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