Sun’s Supernova: The Death of Rock
Several years ago I sat laughing with a coworker behind a closed glass door in Sun’s beautiful Colorado campus. We couldn’t get over the name of the new systems announced to come out in 2008: Supernova. Why did Sun name the hail-mary, company saving, server line after an explosive event marking the death of a sun? Somebody in marketing was either oblivious or prophetic.
Sadly, it appears, prophetic. By not combating the negative news about the death of the Rock processor Sun has essentially acknowledged it, and the Supernova line of servers built with Rock processors are by all accounts dead.
Rock was more than just a chip, it was an act of engineering defiance built to take on the Wintel architecture of few-threaded processing in an age of massive internet-born parallelism. Cancelling Rock is canceling Sun’s dream of being the #1 server vendor in the world again. Timothy Morgan summed up the confusing, sad and costly ($1-2B sunk costs)cancellation saying:
“Considering how close this product was supposed to be to launching – within the next four to five months – and how much money Sun had invested already, something must be truly wrong with the Rock chip or the servers that use it for Sun to cancel it.”
While Sun Microsystems will continue on as part of Oracle, with many great products, they are not a silicon disruptor without Rock. Their home run (hardware) bat is broken and they are in the dugout thinking of what could have been. To realize this massive creative quest amounted to nothing is heartbreaking, and a testament to why so few companies are vertical systems providers.
Imagine instead if they’d just published an incredibly efficient benchmark on Oracle/SAP/Mysql/Apache for Rock. Imagine the full might of Oracle with a world beating internet and business applications processor? Imagine if Google was looking to buy 500k of them a year? (They were talking to Sun about Rock)
Will anyone challenge Intel in the next decade for general purpose internet computing? With Apple building a $1B data-center it seems there are still opportunities out there to solve the massively threaded compute equation. Are faster and faster desktop chips deployed en-mass really the answer?
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