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Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu have announced a quad-core version of the Sparc64 processor and servers to that will use the chip.

Fujitsu--which manufactures and designs the Sparc64 processor--along with Sun unveiled the M4000, M5000, M8000, and M9000 enterprise servers that use the new quad-core Sparc64 VII chip. The two companies claim the processor delivers 80 percent better performance using 44 percent less power than the previous Sparc64 VI processor.

Sun Sparc road map

(Credit: Sun Microsystems)

The Sparc64 VII is made on a more advanced 65-nanometer process than the Sparc64 VI chip, which used a 90nm node.

Sun is no stranger to multicore--putting many processing cores on one chip. Its UltraSparc T2 processor can place up to eight cores on a single piece of silicon. This allows the UltraSparc T2 to run up to 64 threads--parts of a program that can execute independently--or eight threads per core. It's a feat processor giant Intel still hasn't accomplished.

Sparc Enterprise servers using the Sparc64 VII processor are targeted at high-availability, mission-critical enterprise applications, including large-scale databases, data warehousing, and enterprise resource planning.

Current Sparc Enterprise servers can be seamlessly upgraded by swapping out older processors with the new Sparc64 VII chips, the two companies said. Sparc VI and Sparc VII chips can also be mixed and matched within a "single domain."

Pricing and availability information is here.

Pamela Jones of Groklaw rightly takes umbrage that Sun Microsystems apparently stood by while The SCO Group attempted to foul the pedigree of Linux, but how much righteous indignation is warranted is debatable. Jones writes:

And what an icky role Sun played, to judge from (Novell's Greg) Jones' description of the agreement. Look at all the damage that resulted from Sun's silence, the litigation that never had to happen....And as far as Linux is concerned, why didn't Sun speak out to help?

It had in the power of its hand the ability to protect Linux users. Silence. For years and years and years. While folks got sued, and the FUD campaign raged on.

Yes, but this overlooks one convenient point: Sun was competing with Linux. Hard. Not only did it not have a legal obligation to speak out, it may well have had a legal obligation to not speak out.

Every contract that I've negotiated in the last few years has, at the customer's or partner's insistence, a section in it that prohibits disclosure of the contract. I would guess that similar wording is to be found in the partnership agreement between Sun and SCO.

Even if Sun had an obligation, legal or otherwise, to disclose Linux's clean bill of health, why would it? We can argue that it may have had a moral obligation, but it also has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders, which arguably wouldn't have been well-served by propping up a competitor, however unfairly maligned.

I'm not suggesting that I personally could have stood by and watched, had I worked for Sun, but I also think it's important not to burden Sun's efforts to remedy some errors of its past with all the good it's doing now. I believe in that pesky repentance thing. :-)

Finally, I can call myself an inventor.

I've been inventing things for almost 20 years now, but Montalvo Systems was the first company I worked for that took intellectual property seriously. (That was no coincidence; it was also the first company I worked for where I helped develop the intellectual-property strategy.)

During my years at Montalvo, I came up with quite a few ideas and participated in brainstorming sessions that yielded more ideas. Most of these sessions were limited to Montalvo's own people, but there was one person I brought in to help us as a consultant--Don Alpert, who was the principal architect of Intel's Pentium processor and, possibly less significantly, a member of the editorial board at Microprocessor Report.

Working with three of us from Montalvo--myself and chief architects Greg Favor and Peter Song--Don took the lead in preparing a set of related patent applications describing a new way to design microprocessors.

The first patent from this set was ... Read more

LAS VEGAS--Sun Microsystems co-founder and Chairman Scott McNealy wants to help phone companies become "destinations," he said during a speech at the NXTcomm trade show here Wednesday.

Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems co-founder and chairman

(Credit: Marguerite Reardon/CNET Networks)

Specifically, he wants to help these companies develop their businesses around services and content rather than simply providing connectivity to other Web sites on the Net. Sun provides the server technology and data center management services necessary to distribute content on the Web.

As part of its ongoing effort to help phone companies evolve their businesses in the next generation of the Internet, Sun announced on Wednesday a new version of its MySQL Cluster product that is specifically designed for the telecom market.

In a discussion with a handful of reporters after his speech, McNealy elaborated on what he meant by making phone companies "destinations."

"Why aren't the big carriers doing what BlackBerry is doing with e-mail?" he asked. "I can get my e-mail in one click. Why don't they provide chat, public data storage, video sharing, or social networking? It's not hard to do."

McNealy said he doesn't expect phone companies to develop these services themselves, but he said as long as they can brand new services so that consumers want to use them instead of going off on other Web sites to find them, they can compete with the likes of companies such as Google, Amazon, and Yahoo.

Amazon in particular has become a potential competitive threat to cell phone companies with its new wireless e-reader product, the Kindle, McNealy noted. This device allows people to download books, newspapers, and magazines using Sprint Nextel's wireless network. Amazon has bought wholesale capacity on Sprint's network, which makes the online retailer look and act like a mobile virtual network operator, which competes directly with cell phone operators.

Of course, the notion of network service providers creating a portal or destination site for consumers is nothing new. That was AOL's strategy in the dial-up market. And cable operators have all tried to do this for their broadband services. Verizon and AT&T have each separately partnered with Yahoo to create portals for their broadband services highlighting special content and other services. But for the most part, these strategies have largely failed as savvy Internet users often bypass these portals for sites like Google to find what they need on the Web.

Still, McNealy believes that carriers must do something if they hope to compete and ultimately win the battle for users both on traditional broadband as well as in the emerging wireless Internet market.

"They don't have to out-YouTube YouTube," he said. "They just have to out last them. But the real question is do (the phone companies) have the attention span to make it work."

He said Verizon, which is one of Sun's largest customers, could leverage its huge retail presence to market services directly to its consumers much more easily than some of these Web-based companies.

While he acknowledged that most of the large phone companies have already been working toward becoming "destinations," he singled out Australia's Telstra as one in particular that has executed well on this concept.

"It's not like they've been sitting around doing nothing," he said. "But Sol (Trujillo, Telstra's CEO) gets it."

Telstra's BigPond Web site acts as the public face for Telstra's broadband and wireless service offering subscribers content and services directly from the Web site. Subscribers can rent or buy movies online and download music. They can read news or download other video content as well as access games or shop online.

BigPond has been a big success, Truijillo said during his keynote speech on Tuesday at NXTcomm. Specifically, he noted that in 2007 BigPond sports had a bigger audience than its next three biggest competitors in sports content.

"When you have the right content, and it's customized for customers, you get the usage," he said. "And you get it in ways that most people are not used to getting it."

2008 is the year of the solid state drive. That's what Sun Microsystems believes as reliability finally measures up to the rigorous requirements of server storage and the cost per gigabyte plunges.

On Wednesday, Sun announced that it is preparing to introduce solid-state drive (SSD) technology that "will completely change how server and storage infrastructure is designed and deployed in enterprise data centers." Sun said it is already shipping Solaris ZFS software "optimized" for SSDs.

Though Sun is not specifying suppliers, Intel confirms that it has collaborated with Sun on SSD development for servers. Intel is slated to bring out high-capacity SSDs in the second half of the year.

Sun follows storage vendor EMC, which announced integration of solid-state drives into its product portfolio in January.

Solid-state drives give "customers 3x better performance at one-fifth the energy consumption of traditional spinning (hard disk drive) disk offerings," according to a prepared statement by Sun.

Sun StorageTek server array

(Credit: Sun Microsystems)

Solid-state drive suppliers Intel and Samsung have both discussed the huge potential for servers. Samsung said previously that companies like Citibank and American Express peg server performance on IOPS, or input/output operations per second. Hard disk drives typically achieve 120 to 150 IOPS, while SSDs are in the neighborhood of 10,000 to 30,000 IOPS, according to Samsung.

Intel also sees SSDs playing a role in the server market as a "performance accelerator." The chipmaker cited a streaming video example where 10 SSDs could essentially handle the same workload as 62 high-performance hard disk drives.

In addition to performance benefits, SSDs "save on energy costs compared to traditional Fibre Channel hard drives (and) decrease server and storage sprawl in already maxed-out data centers," Sun said. "SSDs consume around one-fifth of the power of both memory...and disk drives, have no rotating media and consume very little power when not in use."

Sun sees SSDs as a watershed technology. "Flash SSD is the most exciting innovation to happen to system and storage design in over a decade. By mid-2009, it will be in the majority of servers and deliver more capacity than DRAM and far greater overall system performance and energy efficiency," said John Fowler, executive vice president of the Sun Systems Group.

Intel is targeting SSDs for consumer and server storage

(Credit: Intel)

Plunging cost is another factor. "Enterprise-class Fibre Channel hard disk drives have only exhibited a 40 percent year-over-year price decline in the last decade, while the Flash SSD price per gigabyte continues to fall between 50 to 70 percent annually," Sun said.

The Mountain View, Calif., company is expected to deliver Flash-based products to market in the second half of 2008. Sun did not cite price or capacities. Today, typical large-capacity enterprise SSD capacities start at 32GB but can range up to 512GB.

I didn't pay much attention to VirtualBox when Sun Microsystems first acquired Innotek, but RedMonk's Michael Coté just posted an interview and demo of the software, and it's very cool.

In a few clicks, you can see VirtualBox create a Vista instance and run it on the Mac. There are many options for virtualization at this point, but I would expect Sun to make this its weapon of choice (versus Xen), since it owns it and can tweak it for Solaris.

On the Mac, I'm not sure it's any better than Parallels, but it is open-source, which should be very appealing for many users.

VirtualBox is a free download available under the General Public License, or GPL.

An analyst at CRT Capital Group says Nvidia may be treading on dangerous ground with its recent blitz of Intel taunts.

While CRT Capital Group analyst Ashok Kumar readily concedes that Nvidia's graphics chip technology is far superior to Intel's, he also issued a warning to Nvidia in a note released Monday: "Nvidia vs. Intel: an Emerging Grudge Match."

"(Nvidia CEO) Jen-sun Huang seems to believe that Nvidia's graphics solutions are better than Intel's because Intel simply doesn't know how to do better," Kumar said. "But there is another element that Huang seems to overlook--Intel has not, so far, been interested in the high-end 3D-gaming market, other than as a vehicle to sell their own high-end CPUs."

Essentially, Kumar believes that Intel, to date, has shown a benign neglect of high-end 3D graphics technology because Intel and Nvidia (and Advanced Micro Devices' ATI Technologies) have had a successful, if uneasy, symbiotic relationship.

But that could change. "If...Huang's recent tirades have an effect on Intel, that effect may well be the exact opposite of what Huang wants--a huge, rich, motivated design powerhouse applying itself to the one and only marketplace in which Nvidia has shown an ability to compete."

In an ideal world, Intel and Nvidia would thank each other, Kumar said. "Intel really ought to thank Nvidia. Of course, that same thing is true in reverse, and there's no evidence of Huang ever thanking Intel, either (especially given that only some of Intel's business derives from high-end gaming, but all of Nvidia's business does)."

A word to the wise: don't hold your breath.

SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems gave developers a gift at the CommunityOne developer conference on Monday--a packaged version of OpenSolaris with a new logo. Now, Sun is hoping developers will return the favor by creating applications to run on the open-source version of its Solaris operating system and thus drive more demand for its servers and software.

The move is the latest in Sun's effort in the better part of a decade to regain relevance in a post-dot-com bust world by transforming into an open source player. Borrowing a trick from Microsoft and its own early successes with Java, Sun has learned that fostering a vibrant developer community, means more apps for your platform, and that theoretically translates into more hardware sales and service contracts, even if the software is free.

During the keynote at CommunityOne, Ian Murdock, who heads up Sun's operating system platform strategy, summed it up: "Sun's goal is to get the technology into as many developer hands as possible. He added, "When you need help scaling ...that's when we make our money."

Sun generally doesn't explicitly target Linux as OpenSolaris' competitive target, but in practice, it's the chief alternative, and the company hired Linux entrepreneur Murdock to spearhead its OpenSolaris effort, called Project Indiana. With OpenSolaris, Sun hopes to reproduce the success Linux had sneaking into corporate usage through developers' free downloads.

Already Intel is on board. David Stewart, an engineering manager at Intel, said his company is working with OpenSolaris on projects involving the Xeon chip, wireless, creating server functionality on a laptop, and power optimization.

AMD announced Monday it's working with Sun to make sure OpenSolaris, as well as Sun's xVM variant of the Xen virtualization software, can take advantage of features in its processors.

Over the past few years, Sun has opened up its operating system and Java Web development software, as well as begun to embrace other technologies like Java Script, PHP, Linux, and Perl. And with its CommunityOne conference, Sun is reaching out to the developer community like never before.

The conference opened with remarks from Murdock, a brief appearance by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, and a panel of open-source experts from Sun and elsewhere discussing the notion of community. Asked what role corporations should play in open-source projects, panel members said paying developers to work on open-source software benefits the larger community, but companies should tread carefully.

"Software projects fail when the company name becomes associated with the project and not the software behind it," said Jeremy Allison, who who leads SAMBA file-server software work at Google. He also complained about companies that "try and capture a project or start a project and never release it."

Meanwhile, Marten Mickos, senior vice president of Sun's database group and former chief executive of MySQL, assured the crowd that MySQL will remain open source indefinitely, despite speculation to the contrary.

But now that developers finally have a full-featured open-source operating system package to play with, will they move away from Linux, which is independent and more mature and established?

"That's the $64 billion question," said Jonathan Eunice, founder and principal IT advisor at Illuminata.

"Sun doesn't need it to be thought of as a commercial success. The trick is is it large enough to be economically interesting and viable and...self-propagating," he said. "Sun has a pretty good shot at it."

(CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.)

Sun's business model does not work and it hasn't worked for a long time. Moreover, open source, MySQL, StorageTek, and SaaS (software as a service) will not fix it. Here's why, but first, a little background.

My interest in Sun began in 1999 when I had dinner with Mel Friedman, then president of Sun's microelectronics group. He was looking for a marketing VP and I was looking for a job.

At the time, Sun had essentially one customer for its UltraSparc chips, and that was Sun. I assumed the company wanted to take its chips into the merchant market, thus the interest in me. That, as it turns out, was an erroneous assumption.