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Re: [PLUG] Re: Well, its official -- Sun is serious about being anti Linux and Open Source
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On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 12:00:04PM -0400, Chip Salzenberg wrote:
> According to Adam Turoff:
> > IBM's my pick to buy Sun.
>
> Well, it could happen, but the hardware lines would be almost entirely
> redundant, wouldn't they? That would be a genuine death.
The hardware is a couple of years from EOL in any case, regardless of
who buys Sun. They're not strong enough anymore to keep the SPARC
Consortium a going concern, nor is the market overly interested in a
CPU architecture that's expensive and slow...
> > But IA64 doesn't sound like the right fit. PowerPC sounds much more
> > reasonable.
>
> Opteron wouldn't be a bad choice, and if anyone but Dell or IBM gets
> Sun, that's what I'd bet on. But if it's IBM ... PowerPC would be an
> almost painless migration, software-wise. It's even big-endian.
Yep. And IBM could easily tweak the architecture to make the process
easier. They've already done that with various variants of POWER/PowerPC.
> > IBM could keep some of the key values of Solaris/SPARC intact --
> > like continuing to run binaries that were compiled ~20 years ago...
>
> Huh? You can't run SPARC binaries on PowerPCs....
Emulation. Same thing that keeps VAX binaries running on Alpha and
IA64, and 68000 binaries running on a PowerMac G5.
IBM's got enough manpower and experience in the art to tuck a pretty
sweet SPARC/PowerPC cross compiler under the hood of a future version of
Solaris. Sure some stuff would break (e.g. things that parse 'uname -a'),
but in the end, IBM could respect the engineering culture Sun has
championed since its inception.
I doubt Dell would/could do that. HPQ might, but they'd certainly drag
their feet about it, like they're doing with the OpenVMS IA64 port.
Z.
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