OK, now I’m going to pick a nit. Schwartz says, regarding IBM,
Finally, the ‘P’ in Power5 stands for Proprietary. You can’t claim your chip is open if you’re the exclusive supplier, guys – at least you can dual source SPARC from Sun or Fujitsu.
Motorola, anyone?
And while SPARC is outshipping Power 3:1 (so sayeth IDC), sure sounds like we’re the industry standard.
Apple ships a hell of a lot more POWER architecture chips than Sun ships SPARCs.
The competitive analysis holds up a bit more under scrutiny:
IBM saying they’re using this to come after Sun really suggests they’ve gone a few degrees shy of plumb – the single biggest threat to low-end SPARC isn’t a funny low volume Power5 box without an operating system. The big alternative to SPARC arose years ago from volume in the x86 market.
Nice pictures, though.