Sunday, February 05, 2006
Outstanding Questions for Sun, Intel, AMD and others...
I have been attempting to find the answers to the following questions with little success and figured the blogosphere could point me in the right direction...
Here are my outstanding questions:
| | View blog reactionsHere are my outstanding questions:
- Azul Systems and their Vega chip seems to have 24 CPUs on a single core. This would indicate that knowledge around multicore technology in the industry is pretty mature. Attempting to figure out why Sun, AMD and Intel are not rolling out new chips this dense? Is this about protecting their product line or something else?
- Several chip manufacturers have talked about virtualization technology occuring within the chip itself. I am curious if there is a consistent definition from an industry analyst perspective as to what a chip should support in this regard?
- Does virtualization on the chip meet the government definition of being "C2" certified?
- Likewise, the notion of hypervisors and the stuff coming out of the Xen project seems to be yet another form of virtualization. What areas between software virtualization and hardware virtualization are overlapping and what areas are not yet discussed?
- Xen seems like a really cool technology in which an operating system can run on. When does it make sense to write an application directly on top of Xen and skip an OS entirely?
- The notion of a virtual machine such as Java seems like it has pretty much everything to run without an OS, could the JVM be easily ported to run directly on Xen without an OS? If so, what would be the performance uplift of not having an OS?
- A lot of appliances are built on Intel. Does Sun provide any unique value proposition for appliance builders?
- Cool threads seem cool. what is the potential for computer chips to draw even less power in the future?
