This article is more than 1 year old

Intel sabotaged Solaris on Itanic – Sun

Erratum not sent

Sun has renewed its offensive blaming Intel for the abandonment of the Solaris OS for Itanic port. (Note to newer readers: Itanium is Intel's 64 bit chip, which was scheduled to revolutionise enterprise computing by 1998, and is apparently still in development somewhere at Zilla.)

Sun VP John Loiacono told The Register that Intel had withheld key technical information and resources from Sun engineers, forcing Sun to shelve the project.

He said that Sun was still sore that Intel had gone blabbing to the press with the news first, and spread the word that Sun was deliberately going slow because of its own interest in SPARC chips.

But surely, we asked, you just need a prototype IA-64 box and a compiler, and off you go? No said Loiacono, Sun's channel of documentation and errata had dried up, leaving the porting team flying blind.

Loiacono said Sun later surmised that Intel had made the strategic decision to bank on Linux as the Unix for the Itanic. Which, is what it is, after the parallel cancellation of the joint IBM/SCO Project Monterey to create a merged AIX/UnixWare for Itanic.

Of course such scurrilous rumours don't gain currency unless they ring at least slightly true, and it remains a fact that Sun makes nothing from Slowlaris, and a whole heap of money from the expensive hardware boxes that Itanic was supposed to commoditize out of existence.

IBM appears every bit as keen on Itanic as Sun these days, note.

x86 axed

Loiacono said the decision to shelve its loss leader Solaris for 32-bit Intel PCs was "simple supply and demand."

"People have come back and said we'll pay for it, but the only way we'll get there if the business model changes."

The Save Solaris on x86 Petition can be found here, and the Intel's own Save the Itanic petition here. ®

Related Stories

Intel says Sun just isn't trying hard enough
Sun hits back at Intel Itanium tale...

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like