Sun Microsystems will help Google build the world's largest computer with Sun's SPARC microprocessors....
. . .imho
Nothing there! Says perplexed tech industry and media on the Sun and Google pact announced earlier this week.
That was the consensus, but they were looking in the wrong place, imho.
Eric Schmidt and Scott McNealy were very likely talking about computer architectures. These are hardware geeks not software. Sun knows how to build highly scalable massively parallel SPARC microprocessor based systems.
Free Google computers
Sun understands 64-bit microprocessor design and the total system design of large IT systems very, very well. Oh, and before I forget, Sun also has a lot of IP in the client/digital gadget side of things...
Within a year we'll see a Google consumer computer announcement, and it'll be free, and cheap to make and made from inexpensive chips because the machine processing power moved into the big computer in the ether(net).
Google and the price of oil
I know for a fact that Google has bought large Intel Itanium systems in the past. And I know it will need massive amounts of computing power over the next couple of years.
Building everything with PC boards is massively inefficient and incredibly electric power hungry. A big Sun system uses far less electric power per microprocessor cycle than that generated by racks of PC servers.
Jet Blue to JFK
I wouldn't be surprised if Mr Schmidt shows up at Sam Palmisano's office in Armonk next to order some IBM POWER systems. Like Sun, IBM has tremendous expertise in the microprocessor PLUS IT system design that Google needs.
And this doesn't mean Itanium systems are being replaced--by SPARC or POWER.
Google is not concerned with either/or, it is concerned about more!
