savantu (savantu@email.ro) on 2/6/09 wrote:
>
>If the Special Olympics is worth $20B per year and Intel
>manages to get IPF to a 40-50% share in the next 5 years,

What "next 5 years". You already used that argument in 2001.

It's expired. Your argument is sitting in the corner of the
fridge, and it's smelling bad. It's smelling so bad that
people now are scared to even open the fridge door, much
less take it out and throw it away.

Besides, I made it pretty clear that "Special Olympics" was
about comparing with sparc. If that was a $20B/a market, the
capitalization of Sun would be a tad higher, wouldn't you
say?

>IPF is in theory economically sound.It simply needs time
>to get its foot firmly in the door.

Right, right.

And that time starts anew each quarter, right?

>IBM once sold IPF systems.Sales ( systems) were so good,
>that they were close to HPs ( the irony ) and a threat to
>Power. Out of the blue ( pardon the pun ) IBM decides to
>axe IPF systems.Was it because it questioned to whole
>point of IBM's in house processor effort ?

Ahh. That stupid argument.

You know what? If you take IBM's decision to stop selling
IPF as a great argument for how strong IPF is, I have an
even better argument for you.

Look at SGI. If just stopping selling IPF is such a great
argument, what a wonderful argument SGI is! They did
not just stop selling it, they went all the way to chapter
11! Now that shows more than any small IBM failure!
Taking the whole company down rather than dismantling just
a tiny part.

Yeah, that argument shuts me right up. I bow down before
your incredible powers of persuasion.

For your edification: what makes IBM's in-house processor
effort questionable is what made all the other boutique
processors questionable: the slow and steady enroachment
of x86 and the commercial advantages of mass markets.

The IPF apologists talk about how IPF can take advantage
of the mass markets through the fab, but they never admit
to the fact that making processors isn't even primarily
about fabs - it's about the designing and the selling of
the damn things.

Yes, fabs are expensive, but the only way you can make
your money back is to sell a metric buttload of the
end result.

Any POWER strategist isn't worried about IPF. They're
thinking about x86, you dum-dum!

Why can't you admit it? You almost come out and say it:

>there were rumors of Power7 being socket compatible with
>Opteron.

.. but you are apparently not able to really think about it.

Notice how they didn't for a second even entertain
the (obviously idiotic) idea of making Power7 socket-
compatible with IPF.

Why? Because IPF does not matter.

>The same applies for SPARC. Both SUNs and Fujitsu in house
>processor programs are under pressure.Rock is make or
>break for SUN while Fujitsu will probably converge
>Primepower with Primequest in the future, porting Solaris
>to IPF.

Mwhahahahhaaa!

Your argument is funny, but you are just sad. You're talking
about how people may "probably porting Solaris to IPF".

And then you apparently totally ignore the fact that Sun
made a hell of a lot more commitment and ported, and sells,
Solaris on x86. Yes, it was easier (they had some old and
languishing support for it already), but that wasn't the
big deal. It made sense.

IOW, you make all these sad arguments for IPF, and in each
case they are really arguments for x86, and against
IPF. But your "IPF matters" blinders seem to make you unable
to see that other side of the coin.

Intel could drop IPF tomorrow, and nobody would care.

Yes, HP would blink, but then immediately put out some
press release about how they continue to support OpenVMS,
and in a day you'll see another one about how Core i7 Xeon
is a perfect upgrade strategy from PA-RISC and HP-UX, and
how they will continue to support their IPF strategy with
newly ported tools to x86-64.

Don't tell me they wouldn't. They've done it before. They
can just fill in the template with new architecture names
and change the date. All done.

Linus