Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Barron's Online - Sun Microsystems Bets the Galaxy

Barron's Online - Sun Microsystems Bets the Galaxy: "To get back in the game, Sun last year acquired computer start-up Kealia Inc. for $92.7 million in stock.
Kealia's co-founder, Andreas Bechtolsheim, co-founded Sun in 1982 with 'workstation' computers built from cheap computer parts. They were more powerful than personal computers but cheaper than mainframes and minicomputers sold by IBM and Digital Equipment.
The Kealia machine, Galaxy, will be the only one on the market that uses eight AMD chips working in parallel, according to analysts.
AMD chips are increasingly in demand, having risen from 3% of servers in 2003 to 7.4% as of June, says IDC.
Tying together eight chips should make Galaxy almost double the performance of existing systems based on only four chips, says analyst Martin Reynolds with Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., making them an economical alternative for tasks such as databases.
'It looks like they'll have a very compelling offering based on the performance for the price,' says Reynolds"

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