Fujitsu has been a licensee of Sun’s Sparc and Solaris platform since the early 1980s. In January, Intel and Fujitsu forged an alliance under which Fujitsu said it would develop high end systems on Intel’s Xeon and Itanium processors. At the time, there were no indications that Fujitsu would be exclusively committing to Intel architectures.
This week Mike Fister, general manager of Intel’s enterprise platforms group, told the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, that Fujitsu was abandoning Sparc as the foundation of its of its future architecture. He said the switch would cover billions of dollars of systems.
Speaking afterwards, Fister said that Fujitsu planned to migrate all its systems to Intel’s architecture, and that Sparc would fade from Fujitsu’s roadmap after 2005.
However, Fujitsu said this week afternoon that it was not contemplating an Intel-only roadmap. Fujitsu vice president of product marketing Richard McCormack said that the company’s Sparc-based PrimePower servers were part of its roadmap for at least the next five years.
He said that current market predictions, while seeing strong growth in Windows and Linux-based systems also forecast continued growth for Unix-based systems as well as machines running traditional mainframe operating systems.
Our strategy is to accept the fact that customers want to buy a diversified set of products, he said. He said the company had clearly stated its intentions to continue to offer Sparc. Our customers want us to.
Fister’s presentation this week pushed Itanium’s claimed performance advantage over Sparc and IBM’s Power architecture. Given Intel’s economies of scale, it could arguably offer OEMs a compelling argument to switch architectures.
A source at another Intel OEM this week was unsurprised by the idea of Fujitsu moving to Itanium. He said that ultimately Sun’s strength lay in its software, rather than its hardware. Moreover, Fujitsu had faced active competition from Sun, the source claimed. Intel, being strictly a supplier of silicon, does not present this problem. Sun was unavailable for comment.
Source: Computerwire
