Wefwef

Sun Micro: Layoffs, and a 13-Year Low

If you really want to blame someone blame AMD. Intel wouldn't have introduced the 64bit extensions and 8 extra registers into the x86 line of cpus, which have helped to bridge the architectural performance gap between x86 and Sparc. Niagaras still reign supreme but Intel's new Nehalem lineup scales up to 8 cores giving lots of trouble to Sun, even though Sun's upcoming Rock should really rock. But when Rock comes out Intel will have Nehalem out in force.

Sun boxes were never affordable, now one can buy a cheap commodity motherboard and config it as a nice server running just about anything, 64bit Linux, OpenSolaris, Solaris itself, or a combination of these with VMWare.

Sun is still great for big servers but they're not alone in that segment either. And their lower end market share is eroded steadily through the familiarity factor, as homegrown techies are more familiar with their own x86 boxes than Sun's datacenter iron.

The irony is that Sun blew this all by themselves by putting a ridiculous price tag on x86 Solaris in early 90's (and pricing their boxes in similar fashion). This gave Linux a free reign. Yeah, what really killed Sun were Linux and AMD.