August 8, 2007 at 4:02 am · Filed under General
While Apple had a good day for press with their new product releases,
Sun made a big announcement.
Today, Sun released the Niagara T2. They made some bold claims like,
“The Worlds First True System on a Chip”, or “The Worlds Fastest Microprocessor”.
I think those claims are a tad shady. However, if you look past the hype, there
really is something there.
The chip has 8 cores that are each capable of 64 threads! Each core now
has an FPU (compared to the 1 FPU on the Niagara T1)
and 4MB of cache.
There is also hardware
support for crypto, virtualization, and I/O (2 10 GB network interfaces are on
ide!). This is an impressive chip. Currently the top-end for Intel is quad-core, and they
didn’t put as much effort into handling as many threads in hardware (hyperthreading
supports 2 threads, compared to the 64 by Sun). If you had the right balance of cpu,
memory throughput, and I/O (a network routing app, for instance)… you could imagine actually having 512 active threads
running on this CPU. Amazing!
One thing was nagging at me, though. It has been a while since I looked at a Sparc, and I wasn’t sure if these were
32 bit cores or 64 bit cores. The only thing the site said was that the chip was UltraSPARC T2. Maybe they were
using a 32 bit design to fit all of the cores on the die. I did a little research, and sure enough, the cores are the
top-of-the line 64 bit cores. Quite amazing! The last time I had an UltraSPARC in production was in 1997 when
they just came out. We used them for web-servers at four11.com, but only in 32 bit mode.
If Sun pushes these systems, they might have a chance at keeping their business alive. I like their technology, but
sometimes that doesn’t win. There is a tremendous amount of momentum on Intel and Linux in the data center space.
Also, my last experience with the Asterisk server taught me that getting Solaris up is still a heavy time investment.
So, they are on the radar, but still not worth betting on yet.
Still, this is another example of competition creating a win for the industry. Lets see what they do with their
advantage while they have it.
August 6, 2007 at 10:07 am · Filed under General
Plaxo has just released Plaxo Pulse.
Essentially, this is the first step towards an ‘open’ facebook or myspace. I tried the beta
last week and they really nailed the feature set. I’m really happy to see Plaxo adjust their
directions and move into this space. Is it game over for the other guys?
Not quite yet. This is just a first step. However, judging by the velocity of their recent releases
they are moving quickly. They are now at the table with all the other guys. Go check it out!
Also, congrats to Joseph, Ryan, the HipCal team, and everybody else for pulling Pulse together!
August 3, 2007 at 3:34 pm · Filed under General
There is a lot of money flowing again… A LOT of money. It doesn’t take
too much effort to see the companies being announced on Techcrunch today are
exactly like companies of a different name mentioned from 1999. So the bubble
is obious. Everybody else is writing about it. Fine, but I still want to thow my 2 cents in.
First, this company, PlayWidgets was
announced on a blog today. The product struck
a chord with me. Why? I wrote a similar app in Java 1.0 as an applet back in 1996.
I wrote it with the free SDK and MS-DOS Edit or D-Edit. That was a long time ago.
Here is the link is here. You will
probably have to load it in IE, since the html doesn’t work in Firefox anymore.
Also, I just loaded it and it looks like there is a bug. I remember contacting
Paul Haeberli when I wrote it. Paul was one of the early graphics pioneers at
SGI who would toss up some great graphics gems on the web when the web
was practically nothing. He had a sample app that properly demonstrated
double buffering in the cryptic Applet API. I asked if I could use his code…
he said ’sure’. BTW, if I recall, his app would take any JPEG and convert
it to an impressionist interpretation. I have no doubt I will see such a
widget pop up on someones MySpace page with the label.. ‘teh bomb’.
Second, although were are in a bubble, I’m not as pessimistic as I was
towards the end of the last one. There are a lot of companies with great
traction (ahem.. BrightRoll ). The internet
is making a positive difference on a lot of problems. Yeah, we’ll have
some royal flameouts (especially in the financial industry… again), but
that will just help bring things back to reality… which is always a Good Thing.
