Save money: buy from the enemy
Summary: People keep joyfully telling me that real men buy wintel or lintel, never SPARC/Solaris - and the numbers on this are compelling: if the rate of increase in x86 price/performance falls by only 18% per year over the first five years after SPARC/Solaris (hypothetically!) disappears, the total cost increase to the x86 buyer community will have achieved for itself will exceed, every year, the total spent to date on SPARC/Solaris.
When Spain opened its passenger vehicle markets to competition on entering the EU, the average new car price fell by about 20%, while the Obama cash for clunkers program, by reducing the availability of used cars, is expected to add about 3% to the value of the average used car still on the market - and significantly more for SUVs.
Those are obvious macro effects of competition. In IT there are similar effects: it's competition that drives the innovation that drives the cost part of what we see as the operation of Moore's law: Intel didn't choose to produce the "nehalem" technologies because it wanted to sell faster processors for less, it got forced into doing this because AMD was eating away at its mindshare within the x86 community and both PPC and SPARC offered more for less beyond it.
As a result of competitive pressure a February 2009 TPC C result posted by Dell shows a per transaction (i.e. per "bang") cost of just $0.60 compared to the $1.53 the same transaction cost according to a Dell report dated about five years (12/10/04) earlier - a gain of 2.55 times in bang for the buck.
It works the other way too. When Apple dropped the PPC for use in its traditional computer products processor competition declined: in 2002 Apple's laptops were faster and cheaper than their (comparably equipped) PC counterparts, but today's Apple laptop is physically indistinguishable from the PC equivalent - and costs more.
IBM has a closed mainframe market and its true believers are almost completely impervious to competitor appeal: thus a 3096 cost $4.5 million in 1982 while today's version runs about $12.5 million -a larger jump than you'd expect from the consumer price index which grew by only 2.3 times over the period.
I get a fair amount of mail from nitwits rejoicing in what they see as they death of Sun - and particularly of the SPARC/Solaris combination. I don't know what drives people to hate like that, but here's a free bit of advice to everybody else: if SPARC/Solaris dies, you can expect to pay far more for your future x86 products than you will if Sun/Oracle gets it together and pushes these technologies as fast and as far as they will go.
Take away competitive pressure from the SPARC/Solaris combination and the rate of price/performance improvement for both wintel and lintel will decrease - imagine that it falls by only 20% (wildly optimistic, in my opinion) and your 2014 cost per "bang" will fall to only $0.29 instead of the $0.23 it's headed for now. Six cents per "bang" - doesn't sound like much, does it? The Dell that delivered the $0.60 I mentioned earlier produced 104,492 "bangs" - and that six cents works out to $6,270 for the system.
For you and me that difference won't amount to much - perhaps a few thousand bucks we could otherwise spend on something else. For big players, however, this can add up to real money real fast - so much, and so fast that people making decisions for thousands of servers every year should be thinking that maybe the best way to get price breaks from the monopoly of their choice over the next few years might be to call their Sun/Oracle representative right now and talk about placing some serious orders.
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Talkback
I can see your point but
Don't think so, no, and doubt it
If you mean desktop computing, then yes there is competitive pressure there, but it's all x86 so a general x86 development slowdown will affect everybody about equally - producing no competitive effects in the market except that price stability leads to a wider split between the high and low ends of the market.
2) no - servers have I/O requirements the low energy CPUs can't meet so short term use of these CPUs in server roles just drives the companies to migrate some of the design ideas to server CPUs but the difference in requirements forestalls complete migration of the tech.
And, of course, the low end power leaders are all PPC - not x86.
3) I don't believe in the cloud for the longer term - I see it as a budget busting solution like 70s time sharing. Either way, however, a server cycle is a server cycle and its going to come from the same kinds of machines whether they're in your offices or someone else's.
Hi,
2. I understand that low energy CPUs have their limitations but I believe Google and Microsoft have done research which shows that the energy savings alone mean they are more cost effective even if you had to use 2 or 3 systems for every 1 server system.
3. I agree, like fashion computing goes in cycles with different fads but once you move your services into the cloud how easy will it be to pull it back again?
My apple laptop
The only way it could be a performence decrease would be for people not using there laptops for things like office productivity or web browsing.
I know because I had a 550Mhz G4 which to be fair was a nice machine and booted very fast but it certainly was not faster than cheaper pc laptops at the time let alone more exspensive ones and had a fairly enemic ati graphics card.
For several hundred pounds less pretty much any manufacture would have a pentium atleast 1ghz which was not slower than the G4 and a decent grahpics card.
Im not sure what you think made the g4 better than the pentium m but it certainly was not its performence.
Please ignore
If it wasn't so funny it'd be sad
Finally reality is intruding into Rudy's museum. Sun's going down - obviously that will cause huge ramifications - still laughing at that one. Sun can disappear with a whimper. but not a bang.
It's amusing how the the right wing conservatives, who by definition never have a new idea (or a good one) are sitting around crying to each other or trying to whip up some anger and violence.
Heard about the stages of grief Rudy?
Just don't get stuck in denial.
Rudy is so silly
only to find that it's already outdated/too slow/nobody cares is what sun have been doing since 2000 resting on their laurels and F*&&ing up. It shows everywhere.
Multi thread/core was the way to go since 2004 but Sun showed how not to do it.
Sometimes ...
If what you are saying is true, then InHell should stop all Itanic production and concentrate on x86. But they have customers that demand the top-end stuff, so they will provide it.
Sun has great ideas and then takes WAY too long to implement them - letting the competition catch and pass them up. CMT and Cell technologies are the future (of large scale computing). The medium scale computing can continue with CISC crap . . .
Oh, I agree
Floating point math and strong memory paging capability are Itanics few strong points. It has never come close to living up to its promise a fantastic example of poor execution!
IA64 is apparently the second most expensive IT project in history. It is probably the CPU F*&&up of the new millenium but it's HP's microprocessor legacy that Intel now has the stewardship of
The little endian, CISC x86/x86_64 architecture is far from elegant and with some bolt on RISC ideas is nowhere as clean as MIPS/SPARC/POWER/Alpha(RIP).
Intel should scrap IA64 and just do x86_64 even though they have to retain millions of extra circuts for backward compatibility unlike ARM which makes me wonder if those atom chips will perform much better when they shrink further.
RE: Save money: buy from the enemy
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