Talking with one of the soon to be exOracle SPARC folks, he mentioned a possible sale to Apple, so Apple could get IP for an Apple server.
Thoughts?
12 replies (most recent on top)
P7n4OLM-1tzr b*tthurt much?
A need to replace their old Sun/Oracle hardware that powers iCloud?
not.
All the now laid-off Oracle SPARC folks were sure somebody wanted to buy us. SPARC team's key skill, an ability to live in la-la land and not understand the basic market forces that made our products not sell, was alive and well until the very end. To all managers and directors who kept telling me until the very end how valuable we all were and how we shouldn't go out looking for other work because something will happen like an acquisition: I was right, and the fact that you out-ranked me inside the stupid Oracle bubble doesn't and didn't make you right and me wrong in spite of the fact that you thought so.
In the Austin hub, and hearing the same rumors.
Grasping at straws, guys. Apple doesn't want or need larry's sloppy seconds.
Apple had blade servers called Xserve G4/G5 around 2002 and later Intel Xserve (around 2006 or so) was in market till probably late 2009/10 or so. Infact, Oracle DB was ported (10gR1) for two releases for Intel Xserve and then Steve Jobs realised that servers are not the market they want to be and shelfed the product along with their storage XServe RAID. I would really doubt if Apple would have any interest in SPARC
MC was talking about this last week, verhesrs at Peet's with a few of the other JF fan boys.
Apple's CPU team is probably the best in business of building processors right now. If they ever wanted to employ their designs in their cloud, which they could eventually, they'd rather get an aggressive fab process from tsmc/samsung and use their own designs. SPARC patents would be of no use to them, they are already way ahead.
Apple is not going to happen. It'd mess up margins. It's not compatible. There are no synergies (at scale).
A group here or there would make sense, but overall, no way...
You can make an argument that going with Accenture or an Indian pure play firm would make sense, but even in that case you'd have a hard time defending your premises...
I think it's likely to see the company split (growth and decline parts) rather than be acquired.
Most of Austin will end up at Samsung not Apple.
Why would Apple in their right mind want to develop a server? They're a consumer company! They might be interested in IP (patents) and experienced people developing high performance processors. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the Austin SPARC team end up there working on Apple's own ARM designs. There have been others that moved to Apple's processor development organization in the recent past.