Is HP spewing FUD because its stupid?
Now this quarter Sun goes and does it again. This time with
HP had to see these trend miles ahead, but you can’t turn the titanic on a dime. Everyone is moving to Linux, what does Linux excel at? Small threads and processes moving quickly on and off the CPU, HPUX isn’t tuned for it. They jump on the Linux bandwagon and let it work its magic in software, while Xeons and itaniums keep trying to be faster, yet the faster it goes, the more chance that the current thread/task is going to sit and spin waiting for data either in ram or more likely that is on the disk or worse still coming down the network pipe. How does the CPU respond? Switch threads and do something else then it has to flush our cache and wait for the process to load the caches then run. Sun comes along and does in hardware what Linux does in software, lots and lots of small tasks and threads pumping out data, if one process spins waiting for data, there are more cores still processing data. Of course Sun also adds the features that make the CPU even better at little threads/tasks. Shared cache, 4 on CPU memory controllers that move data at 25GB/s. Intel’s solution doesn’t even do 1/4th that much memory IO.
In conclusion HP isn’t spewing FUD because its stupid, they are spewing FUD because they are scared, they are on a freight train speeding down the side of a mountain at full speed, they bought into the myth that Intel would catch up with AMD and that power and AC would keep pace if that wasn’t bad enough Sun goes and throws a switch in the track and releases a machine that does exactly what all there clients need and they sell it for less.