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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.

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.

Update 4:02 p.m. PT: I corrected the revenue Sun reported for the quarter. It was $3.266 billion. Update 3:11 p.m. PT: I added more detail on Sun's employee total and after-hours trading.

IBM, Intel, and Google have been immune to the economic slowdown, but Sun Microsystems wasn't.

The server and software company on Thursday announced grim results for its fiscal third quarter, which ended March 30, that showed declining revenue and a swing to a net loss.

Sun Chief Financial Officer Mike Lehman also said the company will cut 1,500 to 2,500 jobs. The company had 34,400 employees at the end of the quarter.

"The U.S. economy presented Sun with significant challenges in the third quarter, masking our progress in developing nations and economies across the world," said Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz in a statement.

Sun reported a net loss of $34 million, or 4 cents per share, a decline from net income of $67 million in the year-earlier quarter; the figure includes charges of about 4 cents per share from the acquisition of open-source database company MySQL. Revenue decreased $17 million to $3.266 billion, a notch below the $3.4 billion expected by analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.

In after-hours trading, Sun's stock dropped $2.48, or 15 percent, to $13.85.

In addition, Lehman stepped back from a financial goal it set in 2007 after declaring Sun had "turned the corner." The company then had aimed for operating margin, a measure of profitability, of 10 percent for fiscal 2009, but Lehman said on Thursday that Sun now is aiming for "at least 7 percent." Lehman blamed the economy, but the figure also was reduced because of MySQL operational costs.

"It's fair to say we're disappointed we're not able to go after the operating margin targets we set two years ago," Lehman said. "It would be damaging to the long-term health of the company to hit an arbitrary number."

SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz rightly gets credit for pioneering the corporate blog as a tool to reach customers, employees, and others. But pretty soon the novelty of his methods will wear off, he predicted.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz speaks at the Web 2.0 Expo

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

"At some point the word 'blogging' will be anachronistic," Schwartz said at the Web 2.0 Expo here in San Francisco. "I communicate."

And he predicted, in effect, that the rest of the executive world will catch up. "Historically, communication took place by being a celebrity CEO who met with heads of state, and got the local media to cover it," he said in an on-stage interview with O'Reily Media chief Tim O'Reilly. "You got the message out in an inefficient and environmentally irresponsible way. Then the Internet came round and gave you a way to reach the entire planet."

In Sun's effort to recover some of the glory and profitability it had in the first Internet bubble, the company has embraced open-source software, adopted servers based on Intel and AMD's x86 processors, and switched CEOs.

One thing hasn't changed, though, from the Scott McNealy era to the Schwartz era: the company tries to be provocative. It's cheaper than advertising, and blogs are just a new way to accomplish the goal.

"If you say undifferentiated things that are expected, then you shouldn't expect anyone to care," Schwartz said, asked about what he meant when he said, "Controversy was...not a byproduct of the strategy--it was the strategy," on his blog earlier this month when discussing his company's open-source processor strategy.

Blogs and open-source software are complementary, Schwartz added.

"Sun makes money by selling the innovations in data centers," but that's a hard market to reach, he said. "Free software and free ideas are the best way to reach the marketplace."

The Vikings sailed in small open wooden ships to discover America long before Columbus. Their 21th century counterparts, the Silicon Vikings, prefer business class when they travel the Atlantic.

The $2.6 billion acquisition of the Swedish IP phone company Skype by eBay in 2005 and Sun Microsystems' recent purchase of Swedish-Finnish open-source database company MySQL for $1 billion has raised hopes among Nordic investors that more big deals for VC-backed Nordic companies could be in the pipeline in the U.S.

(Credit: Silicon Vikings)

And the Vikings have a lot of cash. Venture capital firms from Sweden and Finland-- the Norwegians prefer to drill for oil and gas instead--had a record year in funding in 2007.

"The venture capital in Finland is growing very fast--2007 was the best year ever for fundraising," said Krista Rantasaari, secretary general of the Finnish Venture Capital Association (FVCA). She participated in a panel Wednesday of Nordic VC experts organized by the Silicon Vikings business network.

Together, Finnish venture capital firms collected new funds to the tune of $2.44 billion, most of it pension fund money. In Sweden, the sum was much larger, as the country belongs to the top slot for venture capital in Europe--$6.11 billion was raised for new investments. This means a lot of fresh money has to be put to work, despite fears that a downward business curve also will affect Europe.

Says Blomquist: "This recession will not be a solely U.S. phenomena." According to surveys, Swedish and Finnish VC companies are prepared to invest as much as in 2006 and 2007. Their eyes will be set on the horizon for later exits and for companies that might be ready for IPOs or buyouts when the credit crisis has blown over.

The venture firms are putting their bets on entrepreneurs with global ambitions. "We would never invest in a company that only has a Nordic strategy," said Daniel Blomquist, associate at Creandum Advisor in Stockholm, Sweden, during at the meeting at Stanford University.

With deep dark clouds gathering in the financial skies, people in the VC business still believe Silicon Valley is the place to be. There is very little Nordic capital invested directly in the Valley, where at this moment there is no shortage of capital available for start-up funding. The general trend is that Nordic VCs help start-up companies establish themselves in the U.S., preferably by setting up their head office here.

"Our best cases have had an aggressive entrepreneur who took the step and brought family and bags over," says Linus Lindberg of Vision Capital, which is based in Geneva and Burlingame, Calif.

One of the few funds bringing in Viking capital is Nexitventures, with offices in Saratoga, Calif.; Stockholm; and Helsinki, Finland. Nexitventures has a new fund with a first closing of 50 million euros ($76 million) and hopes to bring in as much as 150 million euros ($230 million) in the final closing stage. The capital is earmarked for early-stage companies in mobile and wireless technology.

According to Nexitventures partner David Aslin, economic troubles can actually help start-ups as big layoffs make it easier to hire new people and service providers, such as lawyers, will be cheaper.

"It could get easier to build, easier to start a company," Aslin said.

Here's a view of some of the headlines gracing Techmeme on the morning of April Fools' Day.

(Credit: Techmeme.com)

The word of the day is "prank." Unless maybe you're one of the ones who got taken in hook, line, and sinker, in which case it's "doh!"

If you haven't already noticed, today is April Fools' Day, but you probably have, since most pranksters seem to get an early start. No single April 1 hoax may have the heft of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds stunt the night before Halloween in 1938, and there aren't usually chores involved like the ritual post-Halloween clean-up of splattered egg whites, but nothing comes close to the sheer volume and frivolity of the April day named for tomfoolery.

And so it is that we turn to the Web.

The earliest jump on April Fools' may well have been at Sun Microsystems, where CEO and uber-blogger Jonathan Schwartz fessed up about having been duped way back on Friday: "Do I Still Have a Job?" We're still waiting on the video that Schwartz half-promised.

Another eager beaver was TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, who on Monday afternoon posted "Why We're Suing Facebook For $25 Million In Statutory Damages."

Google proved itself no slouch. The overlord of search put its spin on the sci-fi concepts of time travel and expeditions to other planets: "Google does April Fools': 'Custom time' and a Mars trip." The company also rocked on with its "Rickrolling" prank. Meanwhile, Wikipedia offered up Ima Hogg, the country of San Serriffe, and 670,000 gremlins: "Wikipedia fudges the truth for April Fools' Day."

Another company with a sense of humor is Canada's WestJet Airlines, which the National Post says issued a fake press release describing a "sleeper cabin" where the carry-on bags usually go: "WestJet, Ryanair have a little fun with April Fools." The Ryanair angle? The Irish carrier said it appointed Bond heroine Pussy Galore as the head of let-your-imagination-run-wild Ryanbare.com.

Our colleagues at ZDNet UK told us we'd all be offline for a wee bit today: "ICANN to shut down Internet for one hour."

Jokey April Fools' Day news stories are a long-standing Fleet Street tradition. The BBC took the opportunity to remind us of one of its favorites, a 1957 account of Switzerland's "annual spaghetti harvest." The hoax program "showed women carefully plucking strands of spaghetti from a tree and laying them in the sun to dry."

But not everyone has a sense of humor. Wired reports that "some environmentalists are trying take all of the fun out of the first of the month," though at least the eco-types came up with a good pun: "Activists Try to Rename April 1 'Fossil Fools Day'."

Maybe what they're looking for is what blogger Bob McCarty is pitching: "Scientists Harness Kinetic Energy from Keyboards."

The mythical sleeper compartment promised by a jovial WestJet.

(Credit: WestJet)

Tech industry publication InfoWorld played it very close to the chest with its nearly straight-news account, "Microsoft, Yahoo agree on buyout price." One of the hints of a hoax at work: "(Yahoo) Employees that Microsoft decides to retain will be offered an Xbox 360 game platform and a Zune music player as tokens of appreciation."

For those who follow open-source matters closely, there's this from "a sparsely attended media conference held in the Madagascar capital, Antananarivo," via IT Wire: "Mono to be renamed as Duo."

And because no day may pass without some news of the iPhone, Engadget on April Fools' eve gave us: "iPhone Dev Team claims to be dismantled, Pwnage tool dead for good? Update: nope."

News.com made its own contribution to the festivities. You've got a three-fer from us:
• Live, from New York, it's...Mark Zuckerberg?
• TechCrunch acquires Tiger Beat, will rename it CrunchKids
• Edit wars come to spy agencies' Intellipedia

For a further compendium, see Slashdot: "Geeky April Fools' Day Prank Roundup."

Some of our readers have spotted April 1 amusements not listed here. Be sure to check out our TalkBack section below.