Sunday September 19, 2004 IBM's plans for 64 bit migration!
While reading news on the net, I happened to stumble across this article by Ashlee Vance, which reports on IBM's 64-Bit Computing Global Technical Outlook in this presentation, available for your downloading pleasure.
What I find most interesting is not the blatent mocking of the Itanium processor which Ashlee wrote about, but the plans which IBM's Linux Solutions group has for 64-bit migration.
Please click on the thumbnail above so that you can see the specific page which caught my interest, and let me explain a little bit about the differences between IBM's and Sun's plans for 64-bit migration.
You'll notice on the bottom of that slide in the presentation it points out that there is finally a compelling reason to migrate from 64-bit UNIX to 64-bit Linux, and that there is finally a compelling reason to migrate from memory-constrained 32-bit commodity platforms to "64-bit platforms". The second part is key here as the rest of the slides go on to slobber all over the reader about the Power Architechture and how the Power 5 Processor which is due to come out sometime in the future will offer "Best absolute performance in the market place", to quote the IBM slides.
Now, let's be realistic here, does the current market seem that it's ready to migrate from commodity 32-bit platforms to IBM's 64-bit Power 5 platforms which will most likely not save them $$$s? I don't think so, and I don't think customers are looking to migrate from 64-bit UNIX to a 64-bit Linux, especially when the systems aren't commodity, but that might just be me.
OTOH, Sun's strategy is based around offering "64-bit commodity hardware" to compliment our currently existing 64-bit hardware solutions of SMP systems which currently provide support for numbers of processors that exceed all of the x86 based commodity solutions to date. And certainly I don't see this changing into the forseeable future for the next couple years.
Maybe I'm completely off base here, but Sun's Solaris Operating System is well on it's way to having a 64-bit port for the AMD Opteron CPU, and currently these processors do offer the "best absolute performance in the market place", based on cost of CPU cycles. They also do it today so you won't have to wait for fabrication in the future.
Now, maybe there are customers that are looking to spend more $$$s than needed, or that don't mind the added maintenance of running the 64-bit port of Linux on IBM's non-commodity 64-bit hardware, rather than cutting costs and migrating to Sun's 64-bit commodity solutions. I guess we'll just need to wait and see how this all pans out as Sun rolls out it's enterprise quality UNIX on 64-bit commodity hardware in the near future, and see how cost effective those IBM Power 5 systems are that will compete with Sun's current and future AMD Opteron based systems.
Oh, and did I mention that Sun is in the process of opening up the Solaris Operating System so that our customers will not have to worry about using a proprietary system? I didn't think I did, but that's for another story...;-)
( Sep 19 2004, 10:19:57 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]
Open Source Summit in Santa Clara
Ok, some of you have read about the Open Source Summit that Sun held recentely in Santa Clara, CA. I've read some interesting comments from people on the web that have somehow been kind enough to post what they have heard in the form of hear-say, and the comments didn't seem very truthful when I compare them against my personal view as an attendee.
For this event, Sun brought in more than a dozen open source figures, some leaders and some members of successful projects in the open source community. There were aprox. 250 attendees who first got to listen to 5 minute lightning talks, and afterwards you could select which breakout sessions you wanted to attend based on your interest in their initial lightning talk. Both the lightning talks as well as the breakout sessions were interesting to most all who attended (based on feedback of the attendees).
We started out with a talk from John Loiacono. I think the guests were convinced that John is very serious about open sourcing Solaris. We also had a special guest appearance from John Gage during the middle of the conference with some interesting comments. The open source team under Claire Giordano which includes Karyn Ritter, Andy Tucker, Jim Grisanzio, Derek Cicero, and Bonnie Corwin, were all in attendance.
Doc Searls gave in interesting talk titled "Beyond the Matrix" which had some interesting analogies. As did Brian Behlendorf who compared the Burning Man Project to open source software.
Other guests included Fred Sanchez (Darwin Project), Joerg Schilling (cdrecord, dvd pro, star, mkisofs, etc...), Mike Shaver (Mozilla), Zak Greant (MySQL), Duncan Davidson (Tomcat), Dan Steinberg (java.net), Bart Smaalders (Solaris Performance), Andy Tucker (Open Solaris Lead), Tim Bray (Bonnie among others), and many others that escape my short memory which comes with getting old...(sigh)...
All in all, Danese Cooper and Simon Phipps did an excellent job at setting up and running the OS Summit.
I have some pictures that I've taken at the OS Summit, please feel free to have a gander for yourself.
( Sep 19 2004, 12:35:41 AM PDT ) Permalink