Sun

Sun announced some new systems today: At first the X4140 and X440 are available with quadcore AMD Opteron processors . Additionally we´ve announce a completely new system, the X4240: Two sockets for Opteron, but sixteen harddisks.

Alec Muffet coined this phrase for the final day of the JavaOne. Somehow the Norovirus was found at the JavaOne. The symptoms of norovirus illness are nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and some stomach cramping. The Valleywag reports about this, too. In earlier times, it was Montezuma's revenge, the beer too much or unfamiliar meals. Today it has to be an virus ...

BTW: I find stomach problems in the US quite normal. I don´t like this chlorinated water, and my stomach hates it. This is something i like in Germany. Pure water out of the tap without the feeling of being in a swimming pool.

Jonathan comments the results of Q3FY2008 in his blog - Our Q3:

Well, without dipping into GAAP accounting, we generated a lot of cash in the quarter (more than $320m), and getting from cash to GAAP income involves a fair number of line items associated with acquisition accounting, amortization of goodwill, tax provisions, stock option expensing - all of which, on a non-cash basis, added up to 22 cents worth of charges.

PS: Dad, i think you are correct with your opinion about our numbers ...

Sh.. we published the numbers for the third quarter:

Revenues for the third quarter of fiscal 2008 were $3.266 billion, a decrease of 0.5 percent as compared with $3.283 billion for the third quarter of fiscal 2007. Total gross margin as a percent of revenues was 44.9, an increase of 0.4 percentage points, as compared with the third quarter of fiscal 2007.

Net loss for the third quarter of fiscal 2008 on a GAAP basis was $34 million, or ($0.04) per share, as compared with net income of $67 million, or $0.07 per share, for the third quarter of fiscal 2007. In the third quarter of fiscal 2008, the company recorded a $52 million dollar tax provision, as compared to a tax benefit of $3 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2007. Net loss for the third quarter included charges related to the acquisition of MySQL, which reduced earnings per share by approximately $0.04.

Not unexpected when one of your most important markets has a slight economic problem.

The compact dependent copy is similar to the normal dependent copy. But this dog knows an addtional trick: The shadow and the master doesn´t have to be at the same size.

The most important point about independent copies are in their name. The point in time copy is an independent copy of your original data. You can use it on it´s own and the copy doesn´t need the original data to work.

The Inquirer reports, that Sun will buy Montalvo System. I don´t think that this will lead to Suns own x86 procs. At first Montalvo was founded by people from Transmeta, thus such a move would add some really bright talents to ours and they´ve worked (and patented this work) on asymmetrical multicore architectures. I assume, this will give us some nice additional capabilties for future multicore CPUs.

PS: I wonder, if anybody thought about asymmetrical cores in the way of having cores with different command sets in one processor ... for example an x86 and a SPARC CPU on one die ...

Official informations about UltraSPARC VII aka Jupiter is a little bit sparse at the moment, but a look at Opensolaris and opensolaris.org yields some interesting informations. Bob Hueston collected the existing fragments in his blog

I planed to write an article about this "Sun will close the source of Mysql" nonsense. Alec Muffet summarizes the real story of this Enterprise/Community Edition discussion on his blog in Whats the SQL? by linking to an authoritative source: A Slashdot article written by Marten Mickos, the former CEO of Mysql AB .... wait ... a CEO writing at Slashdot ????

Michael Widenius gave an interesting presentation on the MySQL Users Conference:The future of MySQL. He talks about the shortcomings of mysql and their solution. A really interesting read.

PS: I wondered a little bit about the last slide ... many observers thought about it the other way round ...

(found via Kris)

Sun introduced the Sun Fire X4140 and X4440 today.The X4140 is dual socket 1 RU server with up to 8 internal disks:

But the X4440 is even more interesting. We hadn´t a quad socket Opteron system in the portfolio for quite a time, but this gap is closed now. As far as i remember, this is the first 2U quad socket Opteron server from a Tier-1 vendor.

The mechanical construction is somewhat similar to the Xeon based system. They use a mezzanine board too, but unlike the Xeon mezzaine board, which houses only memory, the board of the X4440 houses two sockets and the adjactent memory of both procs.

At the moment, both system are available with dualcores only, but quadcores will be announced really soon.

As usual Paul brings an interesting perspective into discussion:

On the other hand.. the way the processors are coupled - done by replacing the the T2’s on board 10Gbyte facility - demonstrated that Sun can now produce highly customized versions of the core CPU set and suggests what I believe may be a unique performance opportunity for this product line.

Taking into consideration the additional transistor budget by the usage of upcoming process technologies, it should be feasible to integrate other interconnect technologies as well, for example Infiniband on die (just think about the latency advantages of an Infiniband port directly conneted to the crossbar) or the integration of additional support circuits for special tasks. I assume, there is only one limit ... the pin count of the proc ... at a certain point you can´t get all the interfaces out of the chip in an economical feasible manner.

Stefan Hinker looks to an interesting fact in regard of our new UltraSPARC T2+ systems:They are scaling really well.

Benchmark	T5x20	T5x40	Skalierung
SPECint_rate2006	78.5	157	x2
SPECfp_rate2006	62.3	119	x1.91
SAP SD 2-tier	2,175	4,170	x1.91
Lotus R6 iNotes	43,000	65,000	x1.51
SPECjbb2005	192,055	373,405	x1.94

Another interesting fact: From view of the operating system this was a jump from 64 CPUs to 128 CPUs, thus the results are even more impressing. Additionally this should stop those comments about the fact, that the UltraSPARC T2 had two memory controllers more than the T2+. You don´t reach a scaling factor near of two in SAP with a proc starving for memory bandwidth.

BTW: I really wait for public results of our quad-socket system

There was an additional announcement today. It´s at the end of the T5140 release: Today, we´ve announced the availability of Solaris 9 containers in Solaris 10 in addition to the Solaris 8 containers, thus it get really easy to migrate you existing Solaris 9 servers to CMT servers (which need Solaris 10). There is even an P2V tool to make this even more easier.