Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

Urgent Information Request - Upper Management from ME

It would be nice and appropriate if some higher up in upper Management from ME (MS, RL, ......) would elaborate / clarify, what changed since Jan layoffs in HW to trigger cancellation of S9/M9 and most of the Sparc HW/Solaris.

I think, at minimum, they owe us that, apart from all the stress / grief / long days and sleepless nights / missing family time, evenings, weekends / adverse impact on health, etc., to tape-out M4, T5/M5, M6, M7, M8, S7 and S8, after being acquired by Oracle, at breakneck speed and in record time.

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Post ID: @OP+P2dcvwA

8 replies (most recent on top)

Sun and Oracle simply stopped keeping up with the market needs or even anticipating them. A blazing new core with HW accelerators for the datacenter back in even 2012 and a solid opensource SW stack would have kept them in business. But RL never seemed to be wanting to really compete. All they did was stamp more of their puny cores on the die and enlarging the cache. Old Sun management had to be canned at the time of acquisition. Amazed that LE stuck with them.

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Post ID: @ekp+P2dcvwA

Churning out chip after chip quickly doesn't mean you are building a chip that the market wants

That's True. Unfortunately these incompetent sparc management give more importance about meeting schedule rather than innovation. Most probably their bonus & promotions are tied to meeting schedule.

sometimes they even freeze the design much ahead (6 months) before tapeout so that they can meet deadline ahead of schedule and boast about it . they reject any new features that make chip competitive. (customers would rather buy something competitive rather than DOA)

hopefully in future they learn a lesson that just hiring ton's of NCG's and not hiring experienced folks will not create innovation. Hope they learn something from Apple/Nvidia how balanced hiring (ncg's + experienced) leads to better designs.

sad to see end of sparc.

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Post ID: @yic+P2dcvwA

There was a port of Solaris (OpenSolaris) to ARM:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/10/opensolaris_arm_port/

https://archiveos.org/opensolaris/

https://www.osdevcon.org/2009/slides/arm_vineeth_pillai.pdf

It was doomed by internal SPARC and Solaris politics. Killed by Oracle after they acquired Sun.

Bringing up Solaris on ARM64 as a subject of discussion would trigger the wrath of the Solaris and SPARC orgs.

Linux on ARM64 is doing very well. Fully supported on RedHat, Ubuntu, SUSE. Look it up.

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Post ID: @zvl+P2dcvwA

Churning out chip after chip quickly doesn't mean you are building a chip that the market wants. RL kept saying the market changed so quickly. Dude, wasn't that your (and everyone above you) job to smell the market correctly???

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Post ID: @aiu+P2dcvwA

For clarity, who is RL?

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Post ID: @bah+P2dcvwA

We actually always pushed and talked about ARM in our org meetings. RL never paid attention. They should have invested some small group into researching ARM and Linux on Sparc very early on. But they are good only for 2+ hour talks with no substance. SPARC was doomed but they should have acted in many other directions early on.

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Post ID: @rpk+P2dcvwA

All of Sparc/ME was doomed back in Dec 2016. You only held onto a belief that it would be resurrected or that layoffs in Jan/June would jump start SPARC.

Oracle only avoided laying everyone off at once to stagger layoffs to spread cost, avoid legalities such as WARN, etc..

Oracle does not care about your grief, stress, hard work, etc.. as far they (or any other company) is concerned, you had an open contract to do the work for X amount of pay. No more, no less. You are now dead weight to Oracle and they are washing their hands.

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Post ID: @srt+P2dcvwA

They have no balls. Larry crushed their balls for them. I did not hear from MS in a while. Smart engineer, stupid manager. Along with RL who took a vacation and could not face his troops during critical times. Bunch of crooks. RL is useful for a 2 hour talk show with no content, wont be surprised if he started a political career.

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Post ID: @qsp+P2dcvwA

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