Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 07:22:07 03/02/03
Go up one level in this thread
On March 02, 2003 at 02:39:08, Jeremiah Penery wrote: >On March 01, 2003 at 20:17:14, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>On March 01, 2003 at 11:48:50, Jeremiah Penery wrote: >> >>>On March 01, 2003 at 10:11:13, Robert Hyatt wrote: >>> >>Sun doesn't sell more than a single million-dollar computer a year. They > >I couldn't find specific numbers on this, but I really doubt that. How else >could they get to $5 billion in SPARC _server_ sales last year? Do you have any >actual data you can give? I'd be interested to see it. I'll look. Several "trade journals" quote such market shares frequently, I'll see what I can dig up. > >>are hopeless in that market, because that is SGI Challenge territory and the > >I'd say SGI sells less big boxes than SPARC these days. SGI is poised to have >_total_ revenue of only $1 billion in fiscal 2003. That's counting the Itanium >machines they will begin selling soon. > >>SGI eats the sparc in any benchmark ever created... As will the big > >Care to back that up with some actual data? I can't find a single benchmark >where a MIPS chip is above the newest SPARC chips. Nor can I find a MIPS-based >machine faster than any SPARC machine. I'm not sure where you are looking. We just bought a batch of (I think) 900mhz ultra-sparcs (6). They are 1/4 the raw computing speed of our best intel box and I am not talking about SMP, just raw CPU power. I can post a crafty bench if you want to compare. They are _dog_ slow. > >>itanium boxes. Hell, even a multi-xeon will eat any sparc on a cpu for cpu >>basis without even using SMT. :) > >I believe you there. But as you pointed out before, processor speed doesn't >matter much in the server world. No, but when you start designing high-performance busses, multiple I/O channels, ultra-high memory bandwidth, it is likely that top-end processor chips will be used as well, particularly 64 bit... > >>>>But that entire segment is 5% or less of the total sales. Probably less as >>>>mainframes are in that 5% category as well... >>> >>>If you sell 5 systems for $5m each, or 500 systems for $1000 each, which is >>>making more money, despite being only 1% of the total volume? >> >>The problem is, it is 5 for $5m, or 5M for $1000. The math is _simple_ >>then. > >Then the one company has only .0001% of the total sales. I gave numbers >representing 1% of the total sales, since you think 5% was too much. Give it >even 0.1%, and the revenue is still equal in that example. > >>>I said they planned to release it for the desktop - the DEC machines, not the >>>Polywell ones - not that they ever actually did so. I visited New Mexico Tech >>>in 1997 or so, and they had 533MHz Alpha desktop machines there. It seemed to >>>me that they were trying to make that kind of machine standard equipment for >>>students and such. >> >>I have one in my lab (an alphastation from dec.) But it was never near the >>PC price point, which left it for the "number crunchers" where it was the best >>around. > >It never reached that price point because it never had the economy of scale. If >everyone had bought one of those Alpha machines, price would have gone down >significantly (development and initial manufacturing cost amortized over a far >greater volume of processors), inspiring even more people to buy them. It >failed to reach that critical mass. Yes, because it was too expensive compared to a bare-bones PC...
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