Sun CTO: Biggest Doesn't Equal Best In Chip World

Sun Microsystems

But that was the message from Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos to reporters Wednesday, Oct. 23, at Sun's facility here.

"CPUs grew up in the image of the mainframe, the goal being to create the biggest, baddest engine," Papadopoulos said. The current flock of 64-bit CPUs--Intel's Itanium, IBM's Power4 and Sun's own SPARC--grew up in that legacy, he said.

So, what's the wave of the future? "Smaller, cheaper, not-quite-as-good [64-bit processors assembled into a system that is much more cost-effective," according to Papadopoulos. A half-dozen processors yoked together, each running different threads, is the way to go, he said.

Papadopoulos foresees single server blades packed with 32 processors tied to other blades by optical networks. "We will build computers out of networks. Today we see computers as attached to networks, not coming out of them," he noted.

Sun hopes to capitalize on a spate of recent acquisitions to forge ahead into the next era of computing. The vendor bought Pirus Networks, a storage virtualization company, last month; Afara WebSystems, a SPARC development specialist, in July; and Clustra, a distributed in-memory database, in March.

Papadopoulos' view is one of increasing virtualization, or pooling, of storage assets, and then of computers themselves. "Operating systems need to work with storage better than they do now. Operating systems now try to own all the storage they see," he said.

As for other promising technologies, Papadopoulos cited RF-ID (radio frequency identification) and RF tags. That technology will enable even small products to be monitored on their way from the assembly line to the end user.

"When for 50 cents I can give an object a signature on the network, there are huge consequences for people's distribution chains," he said. "HP has no clue where its inkjet cartridges go once they're shipped."

Theoretically, RF-ID technology would alert the manufacturer or reseller when a given cartridge is low in ink. The reseller or vendor could then get the user's credit card number and permission, and ship a cartridge replacement before the printer stops making usable copies, Papadopoulos said.

The current economic downturn, which has battered Sun stock to less than $3 per share from a split-adjusted high of $64 three years ago, is not necessarily all bad for the technology sector, he said.

"Innovation is higher now than it was a couple of years ago" when separating good ideas from bad ones was hindered by dot-com hypergrowth, Papadopoulos said. At that time, companies' concerns were purely tactical, and the two big problems were that there was no time to think and line-of-business managers had no time to listen, he said. Back then, companies tended to fund any idea, good or bad, and ended up diluting both their cash and their focus, Papadopoulos said.