Items tagged with Sun
Oracle is launching a new set of SPARC processors it hopes will staunch its market share losses, even as revenue continues to slip. The new T5 chips are built on a 2nm process and refine the T4 core that Oracle debuted two years ago. Like the T4, the T5 emphasized improving single-thread performance and clock speeds, though the new core does double the number of cores per processor to 16, up from eight. The SPARC T series from Sun/Oracle has always interested me, because it's an explicitly multi-threaded design that emphasized parallelism. After Intel announced the end of single-threaded scaling in 2005, Sun's early T1 processors flipped entirely in the opposite direction, emphasizing multi-threaded...
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HP has just announced that it will write off $8 billion dollars worth of goodwill due to poor performance of its Enterprise Services sector. In highly related news, the previous head of that segment, Jim Visentin, has quit to "pursue other opportunities." The move is seen as a readjustment in value of the properties HP acquired when it purchased Electronic Data Systems in 2008 for $13.2B. Do the math -- HP apparently thinks it overpaid, or is dubious of its long-term ability to compete with IBM. Visentin has been replaced by Mike Nefkens, with Jean-Jacques Charhon serving as chief operating officer for the embattled business unit. HP's $8B writeoff is an oddly high figure, given the performance...
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HP and Oracle have been slugging it out in court over the future of Intel's Itanium for months now. HP has just widened the front by asking the EU to investigate whether Oracle acted improperly when it terminated support for Intel's Itanium. HP claims that Oracle is improperly leveraging its software market to compel purchases of its own hardware, while Oracle maintains that Itanium is essentially a zombie chip. Just the Facts HP sued Oracle after the software company announced it would stop building software for Itanium. According to Bill Wohl, HP's chief communications officer, the two companies share ~140,000 customers. The lawsuit is an attempt to enforce what HP believes are contractual...
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Oracle is publicly demonstrating its new T4 processor today and is shipping beta test systems to selected partners. The new T4 chip is a major departure from previous designs. Sun's T1 processor, codenamed Niagara and introduced in 2005, rejected a conventional focus on single-thread performance in favor of an aggressively multi-threaded, multi-core approach. CPU clock speeds were purposefully kept low to minimize power consumption. The Niagara T1, introduced in 2005 The T1, which was introduced in 2005, ran at a maximum of 1.4GHz and offered a maximum of eight cores, with each core capable of handling four threads for a total of 32 threads. The T3, released last year, is clocked at up to 1.67GHz,...
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District Court judges are no strangers to outlandish demands or absurd claims, but Google and Oracle have jointly managed to push their case past Ludicrous Speed and into Plaid ("They've gone into plaid!"). In a hearing late last week, District Court Judge William Alsup informed both sides that they are "both asking for the moon and should be more reasonable." The judge questioned Oracle's estimate that Google had caused between $1.6-$6.1B in damages, particularly considering the fact that the lawyer who came up with that figure had been paid $700 an hour by Oracle to do so. At the same time, he scoffed at Google's claims that the money it's made through advertising on Android devices has...
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Android's rise to dominance as a smartphone/tablet OS has reshaped the mobile OS market--but recent actions by both Microsoft and Oracle could damage the operating system's appeal. Oracle and Google are locked in an ongoing lawsuit over Android's alleged infringement on certain Java-related patents, while both Oracle and Microsoft are negotiating licensing agreements with Android device manufacturers. While this is an ongoing situation, pressure has mounted in recent weeks. Last week, news broke that Microsoft has demanded Samsung pay it $15 per Android device. The deal is similar to one the software giant reached with HTC last year; that handset manufacturer pays Microsoft $5 per Android...
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Today, Microsoft released its detailed security report covering the latter half of 2010. Industry tends in general are positive—vulnerability disclosures in 2010 fell 16.5 percent from their 2009 levels and approximately 35 percent from 2006. Microsoft's own share of the vulnerability pie rose from 4.5 percent in 2009 to 7.2 percent in 2010; the company claims this is largely because industry disclosures fell so sharply in just one year. The general decline in disclosures hides sharp changes in the nature of the exploits roaming the Internet. From the report: Malware written in Java has existed for many years, but attackers had not focused significant attention on Java vulnerabilities until...
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In the past nine months Oracle both acquired Sun Microsystems and recently launched an updated version of that company's 'Niagra' processor. That's an impressive amount of work in such a short time, but Oracle CEO Larry Ellison isn't done shopping. Last Friday, at a company investment meeting, Ellison stated: "Our focus is to build our [intellectual property] portfolio,” Ellison said during the meeting with analysts, according to Reuters. “You could see us buying chip companies. Silicon is very important, software IP is very important." Speculation on which chip companies sent ARM, AMD, and even NVIDIA stocks upwards. Oracle could easily purchase any of the three, or even all of them...
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The x86 architecture has increasingly dominated the server market over the past decade but there's still a market for mainframe, big-iron servers. At present, Intel has challenged old guards Sun and IBM with a mixture of Nehalem-based Xeons and Itanium processors with the octal-core Nehalem-EX waiting in the wings. IBM isn't waiting for Nehalem-EX or Intel's new Itanium processor to hit the market before taking action of its own; Big Blue launched its POWER7 architecture on Monday. At 567mm2 and 32MB of on-die L3 cache, the new CPU is something of a beast. Each POWER7 chip is divided into eight cores each with its own L2 cache. Each core is capable of handling four threads for a total of 32 threads...
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In its annual 10-K filing dated July 30, Microsoft noted that its "Client" (OS sales) business segment faces competition from "variants of Unix, [which] are supplied by competitors such as Apple, Canonical, and Red Hat...The Linux operating system...has gained some acceptance, especially in emerging markets, as competitive pressures lead OEMs to reduce costs and new, lower-price PC form-factors gain adoption. Partners such as Hewlett-Packard and Intel have been actively working with alternative Linux-based operating systems."Now that might not seem like much of a much, but it's a paragraph that has the penguinista community buzzing. The same section of last year's 10-K, you see, reads as follows:...
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HP announced today that it has purchased data storage company IBrix in a bid to expand its cloud computing capabilities. The two companies have been partners for several years, and HP believes the acquisition "further solidifies the company’s leadership in the emerging market of scale-out and high-performance computing storage, cloud storage, and fixed content archiving. This market is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 20 percent per year, which is faster than both the network-attached storage and total external storage markets."Translate that into English, and it reads: "We can store and retrieve your data remotely faster than you can locally, all for less than it would cost you to...
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Just over a month after IBM was rumored to be moments away from acquiring Sun Microsystems, lo and behold, Oracle has swooped in as the suitor. In a rather unexpected move, the sinking Oracle has just procured the sinking Sun Microsystems, obviously hoping that two laggards can somehow succeed rather than simply sink each other faster.Announced this morning, the "definitive agreement" will see Oracle acquire all of Sun's common stock for $9.50 per share in cash, which amounts to a breathtaking $7.4 billion -- or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. Oracle President Safra Catz had this to say about the newly struck deal: "We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle's earnings by at...
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Given the current economic climate, businesses have had to trim the fat in every way possible. One of the key areas of concentration for quite some time has been a growing need to make the most efficient use of technical resources, in the form of increased output with less energy consumption and a smaller footprint. This has attributed to the current push towards technical innovation in the forms of virtualization, cloud computing, and hardware efficiency.Intel and Sun have teamed together in creating midmarketinnovators.com to provide a source of collaborative business and technology insights to Mid-Market companies, which are usually those with 100-999 employees. Increased efficiency applied...
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Sun Microsystems announced that the Internet Archive, one of the fastest growing digital libraries in the world, has migrated its digital archival service onto Sun's open hardware and software platforms and established a new primary datacenter that will be housed at Sun's Santa Clara, California, campus. The Archive chose Sun to help move away from its customized storage architecture into a flexible and open Sun Modular Datacenter (Sun MD) or "Black Box" comprised of 60 Sun Fire X4500 (Thumper) Open Storage Systems totaling 2880TB of storage. The Sun Modular Datacenter Power Distribution Cooling SystemThe Internet Archive, a San Francisco, California based organization, maintains what is...
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