[rescue] Windows XP to be released on the Sun Blade 100

[James Lockwood]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2001, George Adkins wrote:

> In every other computing arena I have experience in, this means:
> compromise with concomittant loss of performance, loss of future expansion
> options.  As a general rule, when a component or sub-system is a
> separate/replaceable/upgradeable part, there is a good reason.  When a
> Manufacturer integrates it into the system, this is usually a downgrade
> intended to lower performance and make the system cheaper and expand market
> penetration, but poorer performing so as not to compete with the big-money
> products.

It's hard to say in this case.  Other than the lack of SMP, the IIi
integration is fairly clean.  With the exception of 64-bit PCI, my AXi is
more expandable and faster than my U30.  The U5 and U10 don't suck because
they use a IIi module, they suck because they were designed to suck by
marketing weenies afraid of competition with faster boxes.  microSparc
(and microSparc-II) entered the low end in much the same way.

> you're not going to start using the term 'Single-User Wintel Workstation' are
> you?

I have no idea what this comment refers to.

> 'Fast Enough' kills companies these days.  Doing 'just enough' rather than
> excelling saves a little money, but then your customers switch to PeeCees.
> There's very little brand-loyalty out there anymore.
> These days, you make Porsches and Cadillacs, or you make Yugos.

I tend to agree with this, but Sun has garnered more user loyalty than
most computer companies have.  That, after all, is why most of us are
here.

I'm definitely aware of the fact that whatever loyalty there is is
transient.  Suns low end has been poor in CPU performance since the early
90's, and seems unlikely to improve more rapidly than Intels.  If DEC had
been more capable of standing behind Alpha, I think they might have taken
away a larger section of Suns customer base.  As it stands now I expect
Intel to eat away steadily at Sun on the low end, much as Sun did to DEC
and DEC did to IBM.  HP and SGI have lost significant momentum and while I
am not writing them out of the market, I don't see them making huge leaps
and bounds in market penetration anytime soon.

I submit to you that Sun is "fast enough" in terms of CPU speed but goes
over the top in clean hardware design and software support.  x86 is
roughly the reverse, at the low end.  The x86 high end is still pretty
darn rarefied and pricy.  Everyone will compromise differently, and I
think there will always be a market for cheap consumer boxes no matter
what the architecture.

If it were possible for me to jump ship to x86 for CPU intensive tasks, I
would have already done so.  The bang for the buck at the low end is
tremendous but I am not prepared to make the tradeoffs necessary.  The
lack of decent I/O, expandability, reasonable SMP and decent 64-bit
hardware kills it for me.

-James