Sun ponders Solaris for Power, Itanium

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This is not surprising: Back in the IA64 announcement days, SUN had an agreement with Intel to cooperate to port Solaris (6 I think) onto Itanium. I recall that back in 1998 SUN had already ported major Solaris part on a IA64 simulator. Apparently SUN was looking even at that time to use the then forcfully promoted IA64. When Itanium came out the performance results were dissappointing and I guess this created the impression that SUN who was already working on the various Ultras could not expect to get tangible benefits from the Itanium.

Now Itanium 2 is looking better, although progress is VERY slow. Power5 is a much better designed system and it can already reach 1.9GHz. It performs better than any Itanium todate.

Power is a better overall architecture when it comes to ccNUMAs and SMPs. Intel RETROFITTED the gear for high processor count systems ONLT RECENTLY. They can reach up to 64 processors as we speak. One problem is that Intel never took seriously the high processor count architectures (although it had some `nice' models in the past such as touhstone delta, etc.)

Nevertheless, Solaris is one of the BETTER UNIX OSs and SUN has plenty of experience with it for SMPs, ccNUMAs, clustered systems, etc. AIX is `nice' but at times it does things in a vcry ... unexpected way It is robust though. HP-UX is another UNIX system that has its own quirks and peculiarities.

I believe that a widely popular and flexible UNIX OS as Solaris running on recent high-end processors will be a VERY attractive combination for MANY types of users.

-m; Posted by: michael-t Posted on: 07/21/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use