The seismographs at the US Geological Survey’s facilities in Menlo Park, California, failed to register any significant activity along the San Andreas Fault on the morning of Monday, January 22. Still, what happened a few miles north in San Francisco that day was an earth-shaking event that will be rumbling through Silicon Valley for months and years to come.
Intel and Sun Microsystems announced that they will collaborate on a number of technical projects. Most importantly, Sun said it would use Intel processors in its computer servers and workstations for the first time in a coon’s age.
If you don’t think this is terribly important or significant, then please consult Google News, which posted more than 800 news articles on the subject within 24 hours of the press conference.
For much of its history, Sun Micro was a lone wolf in Silicon Valley: it designed its own processors (the SPARC and UltraSPARC, in multiple variations), cobbled together a version of the UNIX operating system (Solaris), and developed its own networking hardware. Creating the Java programming language, with its “write once, run anywhere” ethos of code compatibility, brought a sea change to the company. It wasn’t quite open-source development, like Linux, but it was more community-minded than what Microsoft was offering at the time in programming software and operating systems.
After Scott McNealy, Sun’s former CEO, famously slagged Intel’s Itanium processors four years ago, relations between Intel and Sun turned frosty. It took a change of CEOs at both companies to create an atmosphere of détente.
Intel’s gain is AMD’s loss, of course; AMD had found sockets in Sun servers with its Opteron processors. Now, some of those sockets will be filled with Intel’s Xeon processors. Sun will continue to use both Opteron and UltraSPARC processors in the future, but this is a big win for Intel, by any measure.
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