This article is more than 1 year old

Sun blasts “1970s” Itanic

Defends "artistic" roadmap. Hmmm.

Sun blasted the Itanium family as "1970s technology" in briefings about forthcoming SPARC processors. Sun described it as a 'roadmap', but there's significantly less detail in the new official disclosed than what InfoWorld reported here.

David Yen, VP for the processor and network products at Sun, said Itanic was motivated by "late 1970s supercomputer thinking", and was "praying that there is a lot of parallelism and that the compiler can handle the parallelism".

Indeed, this was the decade of the disaster movie, and this one sank the Lew Grade empire. (Grade later joked it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic).

But unlike the private roadmaps with which Sun briefs its customers and partners, the public version has no time commitments. After 2002, the X-Axis is blank… a space in which you can write "the future", we guess.

"I have to apologize again," said Yen, when questioned on this on this lack of road in the roadmap. "You and your colleagues were trying to extrapolate and fill in the missing timeline. The diagram was not intended to be proportional - so whether it's a linear or a logarithmic scale, I can't say," he joked.

"We allow the marketing people to be very artistic in that area," he added.

Sun has already said it will employ multi-threading (SMT) and multiple cores on a die in UltraSPARC IV and V respectively, the EE Times reported last August, although Yen wouldn't commit to that today. US4 will be a two core CMP, we understand.

Yen wouldn't commit to a ship date for systems featuring Jalapeno (UltraSPARC IIIi), which is crucial to Sun's low-end SPARC strategy, or for a ship date for anything else.

Yen did say that the product family could use some rebranding, particularly at the low-end. Pressed on whether it was viable to continue with a low-end at all, Yen said "you will not see with a chip to compete with PIII or P4 just trying to achieve a lower cost component."

He announced Sun had bought an interesting networking infrastructure company, and we cover that here. ®

Related Story

Sun to put x86, faster SPARCs in blades
Debian boost as Sun buys SPARC edge start-up

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like