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Sun co-founder returns to fold

Stephen Shankland CNET News.com

Published: 18 Feb 2004 11:55 GMT

What's different about Sun that you would rejoin the company?
Everybody has a little more gray hair, including myself. But we got more efficient with age. The new era here is nonreligious. There are incredible opportunities with Sparc-Solaris and with Linux-Opteron. It's not exclusionary. That's what made it attractive to me. In the past, Sun just sold UltraSparc systems, but customers, in the end, want other solutions.

What will your role be at Sun, and what will you do?
I'll be chief architect of the Volume Systems Products group. I like efficiency. I think that I can help by making things faster with a larger group. Neil Knox's Volume Systems Products group is one of the smallest at Sun. This is all about execution. There's going to be one chip coming after the next.

At Cisco, you were a networking technology executive, and now, Sun is bringing more networking into its gear, with its blade servers and with its planned acquisition of Nauticus. Will you continue that network work at Sun?
No. That was my previous job.

Will you be picking up the screwdrivers and soldering irons and building new servers?
I like to work with the engineers and will do so at Sun. Part of efficiency is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Besides continuing with Opteron work, I'll also closely work with other parts of Neil's organisation. There's a great opportunity to accelerate Sparc.

You said that Kealia's systems will be certified to run Windows as well as Linux and Solaris. Sun won't touch Windows servers with a 10-foot pole. What do you think of selling Windows servers?
It's really hard to add value to Windows. Whatever you add, Microsoft is going to take away from you.

Linux has opportunities. There are many ways to add value. There are lots of things Sun customers expect that are missing from Linux.

What is Opteron's performance? Is it easier to design servers with Opteron than other chips?
Opteron has the industry-leading benchmarks, except for floating-point mathematical calculations, for which Itanium is faster. If you look at SPECweb99 or CINT2000, Opteron is the fastest CPU. Advanced Micro Devices did really well.

What about Opteron system design?
It's fairly straightforward. But you still have to make the right choices, whether it's two-way [a two-processor server], four-way or eight-way.