Should SUN Push x86 More Aggressively to Catapult OpenSolaris?
I wrote a piece the other day stating that I had reconsidered my initial assessment of OpenSolaris, and that it may turn out to be a more powerful project than I had first thought. If you don’t feel like reading what I wrote, the bottom line is that OpenSolaris is developing a strong community and communities are powerful. I think there is something else SUN could do, however, that would also have a strong impact on their ability to re-ignite the IT world’s interest in Solaris. Push harder into x86 and migrate away from UltraSPARC. I highly doubt SUN will do that, as they seem pretty bullish on the platform. Personally, I’m not so sure. Hear me out. In the early days of SPARC, it was clear that a proprietary RISC architecture was strategically very key for SUN. There was nothing from Intel at the time that could compete with the SPARC chips, and if you were in the market for a high end workstation or server then a non-Intel platform was the obvious choice. Those days are long past. I’m
