Soul of a new standard server

IW: You were talking earlier about wire speed I/O and interfaces like InfiniBand. How special is your implementation of Ethernet in terms of performance?

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AB: That's industry standard, but we have wire-speed performance on Gigabit Ethernet of course. When I was talking about InfiniBand, what I really meant to say was that today that's a niche market, but the OpenIB effort -- which is a way to do a horizontal stack that's part of the Linux operating system rather than being provided by third-party vendors -- that's coming along pretty well. We think roughly a year from now there will be a stable, high-functionality, OpenIB stack available, which really means that it will have the full support of the Linux operating system. We're working on a similar stack for Solaris that should be available next year as well. At that point you could run your storage over InfiniBand, your cluster, your MPI …. It's a great technology for high-performance clustering and high-performance storage. Obviously Fibre Channel is the entrenched interface there, and will be around for many, many years. But quite frankly, InfiniBand provides significantly better cost performance.

IW: Could you have done Galaxy with Intel technology?

AB: Intel has 80 percent or whatever of the market. Lots and lots of people are reselling their technology. We could have built exactly the same product as anybody else, but we couldn't have built a better product. What we have been trying to do here is to deliver superior cost performance to the market, and AMD enabled us to do that. That doesn't mean we're anti-Intel. If Intel has a superior chip in the future, we'll consider using that. But in the meanwhile AMD looks really good.

IW: Moving to in-house engineered systems allows Sun to tune the motherboard and give it unique characteristics while staying within standards. Do you envision future Sun software that takes advantage of your unique engineering?

AB: Yes. This is largely in the area of the fault-management architecture, which is how the service processor communicates with the operating system. We can add more features there to Solaris than what's available today under Linux. That doesn't mean it couldn't be added, but somebody has to do the work in the Linux world or on the Microsoft side to perform the information exchange between the main CPU and the management processor. These are things like [allowing] the management processor [to] see the bad pages or the bad memory, disk, etc. that the operating system discovers by being the operating system.

IW: Reports of your return have been framed as a white knight scenario, where you are described as the creator of the server that will save the company. That's ridiculous of course, but how would you describe the mood and spirit of the company right now?

AB: At the 100,000-foot level, the vast majority of Sun's business continues to be Sparc. What's exciting there is the new [multithreaded] architecture for Sparc -- it's called Niagara internally -- delivers much better throughput than anybody thought would happen. All the benchmarks are coming in, and it's a big positive surprise to people. That new chip will reinvigorate the Sparc side of the house as well, and it confirms the design decisions that were made there, in terms of the multicore, the multithreading, to really gain an unbelievable amount of throughput per power.

Now, Sparc does not have the same single-threaded throughput as the Opteron chip, so for technical kinds of applications the Opteron chip is probably the choice. But we see very positive customer response to these new Sparc chips, and on throughput per power, throughput per density, they beat Opteron hands down. It's not that Sparc is at a dead end here. Instead, we are focused on enhancing these multicore, multithreaded chips to have even more throughput going forward. One of the advantages of RISC architecture compared to the industry architecture is that each core is smaller, so you can have more cores per chip with Sparc than you can have with Opteron. That advantage is not going to change. Sparc is alive and well, and the Sparc business is not just stabilizing but showing some improvements along these lines.

I think that is improving the mood at Sun, but it is true that if a company sees declining market share against another technology that it hadn't participated in, that does not create a great feeling. The way we are going to get out of this is by having both good products in the industry standard space as well as reinvigorated products on the Sparc side.