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Sun has some amazing engineering staff. They produced such wonders as Dtrace, Sparc, and ZFS. If IBM were to buy them and take the good portions it would be a h

by Dobbs 18y ago

Sun has some amazing engineering staff. They produced such wonders as Dtrace, Sparc, and ZFS. If IBM were to buy them and take the good portions it would be a huge boon to IBM, Open Source and the software/computing community.

adrianwaj 18y ago
What should IBM do with the Sun brand once it cherry-picks all the good parts?
- Dobbs 18y ago
  Java is strong (while not most 'hacker's cup of tea) large amounts of buisnesses like it. I could see IBM cleaning up some of the less pleasant sides of it and continuing to support it slash push it under the Sun brand. If they were to rebuild the Sparc line this could also be done under the Sun brand. I could see rebuilding sparc to be useful particuarlly in response to the latest Intel AMD debacle. If they made something like KVM (kernel virtual machines) more strongly built into the hardware this would likewise help them push the line. IBM is a smart company, they could definitely create a decent buisness plan to use Sun to their advantage.
  - pavlov 18y ago
    IBM has the POWER lineage of RISC CPUs for servers, which has consistently beaten Sparc in benchmarks for at least the past eight years or so. POWER also has the advantage of having a shared ISA (and thus shared R&D) with IBM's PowerPC-based mainstream products, e.g. the CPUs used in Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Thus I think that Sparc will be among the first casualties if this merger goes through.
    - Tamerlin 18y ago
      I think you're right about this one. SPARC hasn't been competitive since the late 90's, so it's hard to see why IBM would care about keeping it alive in the face of POWER -- not to mention, IBM is also one of Intel's biggest server OEM's.
delano 18y ago
Dtrace is an incredibly technology. Debugging performance problems in production is literally a dream come true.
- nailer 18y ago
  It's also much easier to use than SystemTap.
j2d2 18y ago
These people will find a good home elsewhere. Sun, as a company, has been floundering since the dot com crash. Their most popular stuff is free and many people choose cheap linux boxes over heavy duty sun boxes. The investment bank I used to work for is a good example of the heavy computing world dropping Sun. A merge with IBM would solidify their irrelevance if you ask me...

by Dobbs 18y ago

adrianwaj 18y ago

What should IBM do with the Sun brand once it cherry-picks all the good parts?

Dobbs 18y ago
Java is strong (while not most 'hacker's cup of tea) large amounts of buisnesses like it. I could see IBM cleaning up some of the less pleasant sides of it and continuing to support it slash push it under the Sun brand. If they were to rebuild the Sparc line this could also be done under the Sun brand. I could see rebuilding sparc to be useful particuarlly in response to the latest Intel AMD debacle. If they made something like KVM (kernel virtual machines) more strongly built into the hardware this would likewise help them push the line. IBM is a smart company, they could definitely create a decent buisness plan to use Sun to their advantage.
- pavlov 18y ago
  IBM has the POWER lineage of RISC CPUs for servers, which has consistently beaten Sparc in benchmarks for at least the past eight years or so. POWER also has the advantage of having a shared ISA (and thus shared R&D) with IBM's PowerPC-based mainstream products, e.g. the CPUs used in Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Thus I think that Sparc will be among the first casualties if this merger goes through.
  - Tamerlin 18y ago
    I think you're right about this one. SPARC hasn't been competitive since the late 90's, so it's hard to see why IBM would care about keeping it alive in the face of POWER -- not to mention, IBM is also one of Intel's biggest server OEM's.

delano 18y ago

Dtrace is an incredibly technology. Debugging performance problems in production is literally a dream come true.

nailer 18y ago
It's also much easier to use than SystemTap.

j2d2 18y ago

These people will find a good home elsewhere. Sun, as a company, has been floundering since the dot com crash. Their most popular stuff is free and many people choose cheap linux boxes over heavy duty sun boxes. The investment bank I used to work for is a good example of the heavy computing world dropping Sun. A merge with IBM would solidify their irrelevance if you ask me...