BM Seer Facts & Questions from an Anonymous Sun Source

Sun continues to grow

Thursday May 24, 2007

Sun continues to grow, lots of great new products and even more coming soon. http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2007-05/sunflash.20070523.1.xml

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Posted at 05:16AM May 24, 2007 by BM Seer in Misc
Tags: sun sunw

IBM too tricky for good of others?

Thursday Feb 22, 2007

IBM's TPC-C results not worthy of belief? Lots of unrealistic optimisations? Sometimes you never know what you find when you start searching the web. After yesterday's posting I started looking. Here is info from June 2005 IBM interview: (who knows what they've done since that doesn't benefit users?)
http://www.sigmod.org/sigmod/record/issues/0506/p71-column-winslet.pdf

"And the good news is that about 40-70% of the stuff we do in performance tuning actually ends up helping end users. " Bruce Lindsay, IBM fellow

Ouch! Sun aims for benchmark tuning that end users actually use! Does this explain IBM's over-inflated TPC-C results?

A: "Well, we do things that are very, what should I say? Intense. We get down to the level of worrying about the physical column order in the table so the reference columns are near each other, minimizing cache misses during fetching. This is feasible in the TPC-C benchmark because there are only five tables and only ten to fifteen columns in each table. In a more realistic application, where there are many more queries to be considered, the tables are typically much, much wider, in the 80 to 100 column range; and there are dozens if not thousands of tables. Then this kind of analysis is no longer practical." Bruce Linsay, IBM fellow

Good reason to make benchmarks messy and change them often. Is this why IBM hasn't published SPECint_rate2006 because they can't do the above?

We were right with these past postings:
http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/ibm_continues_to_abuse_and
http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/selective_vision
...interesting...

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Posted at 07:17AM Feb 22, 2007 by BM Seer in IBM Follies
Tags: benchmark ibm specint_rate2006 sunw tpc-c

smugmug like

Thursday Feb 08, 2007

check it out: http://blogs.smugmug.com/onethumb/2007/02/07/server-analysis-sun-victory/

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Posted at 08:44AM Feb 08, 2007 by BM Seer in Misc
Tags: smugmug sun sunw

Many more reasons that people are paying attention to Solaris

Monday Jan 22, 2007

As I've mentioned here, using Solaris can really help your performance: (ex: http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/update_solaris_beating_linux_performance

Last night you probably also saw various leaks on yahoo about things that Sun and Intel are up to on Solaris. To get the straight scope go to: http://www.sun.com/2007-0122/feature/index.jsp?intcmp=hp2007jan22_intel_live

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Posted at 10:23AM Jan 22, 2007 by BM Seer in Misc
Tags: intel solaris sunw

a rock story...

Tuesday Dec 19, 2006

This came out a week or so ago and you may have missed it like I did:
http://news.com.com/Sun+puts+16+cores+on+its+Rock+chip/2100-1006_3-6141961.html

and a Niagara story...
http://news.com.com/Sun+Niagara+sequel+more+power-efficient/2100-1006_3-6141202.html

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Posted at 11:39AM Dec 19, 2006 by BM Seer in Future Technology
Tags: rock sun sunw

Sun gets its mojo back

Monday Dec 18, 2006

We're charging back.

InfoWorld has an article about Sun:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/12/18/51NNtechwatch_1.html

...and they didn't even talk about the killer hardware products that beat competitors on performance, $/Perf, Wattage, SWaP, etc...

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Posted at 10:02AM Dec 18, 2006 by BM Seer in Misc
Tags: sunw

Sun's many positive indicators

Wednesday Nov 29, 2006

News about Sun, lots of things are moving in the right direction. I saw of this passed around inside Sun, but I'll share since all the links are all external.

Market Share & Opinions

Gartner Report: ...Huge market share gains by Sun (25% growth)
http://gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=498468

Sun's Market Share: ...growth for Third Consecutive Quarters
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/061122/sfw020.html?.v=75

Analyst Opinions of Sun: ...recent changes are all upgrades
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ao?s=SUNW

Various Financial Details

Sun's Income statement: ...revenue growth by $2B (18%)
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=SUNW&annual

Sun's Improving Cash flow: ...positive 'Total Cash Flow From Operating Activities' for the last 3 years.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/cf?s=SUNW&annual

Sun's Balance Sheet: ...'Cash And Cash Equivalents' $3.5B in the bank.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=SUNW&annual

SUNW Stock Price: ...increased by 37%.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=SUNW&a=10&b=29&c=2005&d=10&e=29&f=2006&g=d&z=66&y=198

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