Comment by jedberg
7 hours ago
> Sun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business.
I would contend that Sun was never interested in running a business. They always cared more about building amazing technology and suffered the sales to make money.
You can't deny that Sun hardware was top tier and always ahead of its time (until Oracle bought them).
Edit: I had on rose colored glasses. I was thinking of late 90s SUN. They did in fact start getting crushed in the early 2000s.
I think this sorta forgets how slow the cpus were - I was running mostly ASIC design workloads on big Sun hardware in 2001 and we eventually got some x86 boxes that were only 32 bit but could run some of our jobs - and the single-threaded perf of these commodity machines was amazing compared to the Sparc boxes. When x86-64 came around, this was the death of all the Sun hardware in that group.
Also sometime in 2000 I had interviewed at Compaq - the old Alpha group who I think later worked on Itanium at Intel. They were constantly frustrated because they couldn't even get a build from Synopsys of the design tools they needed to run on Alpha and were forced to use Sun hardware they described as "gasping and wheezing" to design their crazy fast cpu.
Sun lost on a bunch of fronts, but I think the amazing thing is they let happen to them what they did to the other big UNIX vendors before - they were eaten from the bottom by faster cheaper hardware.
Yes, I had the same experience while using various Sun computers between 1995 and 2005. During all that decade the Sun computers were reliable, but excessively slow.
Around the beginning of 2006, I had a laptop with a 64-bit AMD Turion CPU and I could run on it Cadence and Mentor tools for ASIC design and the simulations were much faster than on a big Sun multi-processor server. Later that year our team finally got some servers with AMD Opteron, which accelerated dramatically the work in comparison with the traditional Sun servers.
I recall a fork/exec heavy shell script at a previous job that ran about an order of magnitude (~25s vs 3s) slower on Solaris/SparcV9 vs Linux/Intel P3 circa 2003. The standard retort back in those days was to rewrite it in Perl.
I can deny it. It was OK, but not amazing. I had to make pretty frequent repair calls on their gear--much more frequently than the less-technologically-amazing-but-solid-as-a-rock Dell and Compaq gear. IBM, Digital, and HP (yes, that HP, before they lost the Way) also had very good UNIX gear, but Sun had the mindshare during the '90s.
In terms of performance, even Linux 0.x on a 33Mhz 486-class processor could outperform a uniprocessor Sun/SPARC box at a fraction of the price.
I also question the sanity of anyone who thinks Sun's choice of 13W3 for a video connector was a good one. :-)
I don't know, the clustering on Solaris was pretty amazing, if we are just judging "ahead of time"
I loved Sun hardware but I'll deny that they were ahead of their time after 2003 or so. I had a boss who loved his pizza box but Intel/Linux crushed them in the 2000s on a price/performance basis.
One of the things that Larry Ellison found utterly baffling when he acquired Sun was the way that sales commission was calculated. It was all on the value of the contract, with no requirement for the contract to be profitable.
At least in the later stages of life Sun sales folks were literally selling the company into bankruptcy. They'd find out what competitors were offering, undercut it to the degree they'd make a loss, just to get the contract and their sweet commission.
To not realise you've got this going on really speaks to how little they were interested in the actual running of the business.
Sun's various divisions all cared very much about their respective vendor lock-in, so they didn't innovate fast enough. The divisions that didn't have that innovated. On the way downward Sun cannibalized itself (think Sun PS getting closed).
That's the whole gist.
> You can't deny that Sun hardware was top tier and always ahead of its time (until Oracle bought them).
From Brian Cantrill's original HN comment in 2011(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033): "I never hesitated to tell anyone that was listening that our x86 boxes were starting to smoke the hell out of UltraSPARC". SPARC stopped being ahead of its time way before being bought by Oracle.
>> You can't deny that Sun hardware was top tier and always ahead of its time (until Oracle bought them).
> SPARC stopped being ahead of its time way before being bought by Oracle.
You seem to be focusing strictly on performance, but there were other factors: e.g., remote management is still a bit of a mess with x86. With SPARC everything can be done on the CLI (serials consoles or SSH), with x86 quite often you're still clicking on "open KVM window" for so many things. And of course many/most vendors make you purchase an 'advanced license' to use the remote KVM functionality of the LOM system.
Yeah, that was amazing. And so, I learned how to provide LILO + agetty on COM1 on every server I was admining :) So, unless there was HW fault, I could just connect to server via serial to check things out.
Why is that a property of the ISA?
2 replies →
> You seem to be focusing strictly on performance,
Just like the vast majority of buyers do. SPARC was abandoned by customers due to poor performance.
> but there were other factors: e.g., remote management is still a bit of a mess with x86
That's a property of the systems integrator, not the ISA. Dell's iDRAC works quite well.