Comment by Annatar
10 years ago
> There's not enough demand to make them competitive in price-performance.
There does not need to be demand: Steve Jobs (in)famously said that where there was no market, "create one".
I for one would absolutely love to be able to buy an illumos-powered A4-sized tablet which ran a SPARC V9 instruction set, plugged into a docking station, and worked with a wireless keyboard and mouse to be used as a workstation when I'm not walking around with my UNIX server in hand. Very much akin to Apple Computer's iPad Pro (or whatever they call it, I don't remember, nor is that really relevant).
But the most important point was, and still is, and always will be: it has to cost as much as the competition, or less. Sun Microsystems would just not accept that, no matter how much I tried to explain and reason with people there: "talk to the pricing committee". What does that even mean?!? Was the pricing committee composed of mute, deaf and blind people who were not capable of seeing that PC-buckets were eating Sun's lunch, or what?
"There does not need to be demand: Steve Jobs (in)famously said that where there was no market, "create one"."
What people forget is that Steve Jobs was a repeated failure at doing that, got fired, did soul-searching, succeeded with NEXT, got acquired, and then started doing what you describe. Even he failed more than he succeeded at that stuff. A startup trying to one-off create a market just for a non-competitive chip is going to face the dreaded 90+% failure rate.
"But the most important point was, and still is, and always will be: it has to cost as much as the competition, or less."
That's why the high-security stuff never makes it. It takes at least 30% premium on average per component. I totally believe your words fell on deaf ears at Sun. I'd have bought SunBlades myself if I could afford them. I could afford nice PC's. So, I bought nice PC's. Amazing that echo chamber was so loud in there that they couldn't make that connection.
"I for one would absolutely love to be able to buy an illumos-powered A4-sized tablet which ran a SPARC V9 instruction set"
That's actually feasible given the one I promote is 4-core, 1+GHz embedded chip that should be low power on decent process node.
http://www.gaisler.com/index.php/products/processors/leon4?t...
The main issue is the ecosystem and components like browsers with JIT's that must be ported to SPARC. One company managed to port Android to MIPS but that was a lot of work. Such things could probably be done for SPARC as well. The trick is implementing the ASIC, implementing the product, porting critical software, and then charging enough to recover that but not more than competition whose work is already done for them. Tricky, tricky.
Raptor's Talos Workstation, if people buy it, will provide one model that this might happen. Could get ASIC's on 45-65nm really quick, use SMP given per-chip cost is $10-30, port Solaris/Linux w/ containers, put in a shitload of RAM, and sell it for $3,000-6,000 for VM-based use and development. It would still take thousands of units to recover cost. Might need government sales.
The problem is the number of people who are into Illumos and want a portable Unix server is insignificant. All products came with fixed overheads (e.g. cost of tooling to start production), which have to be divided over the likely customer base. Small customer base == each customer pays a bigger share of the fixed overheads.
Basically, you want something to suit you and a small number of other people, but you won't pay for the cost of having something that "tailor made". You will only pay for the high-volume, lower-cost, more general product. So... that's all you get.