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SUMMARY
This IDC Insight examines Sun's new technology road map and other factors that have the potential to impact hardware residual values. Sun's recent announcements and events include the following: - Announcement of UltraSPARC IV-based servers
- New technology road map that excludes the UltraSPARC V and instead moves directly to Rock and Niagara processors
- Adoption of AMD processors into the low end of the product line
- Partnership with Fujitsu to merge SPARC development
- Increased focus on quality control and maintenance of used hardware, including stricter enforcement of Solaris relicensing policies
In addition, this Insight looks at overall competitive conditions with rivals IBM and HP in the marketplace and the impact of this competition examined by low-end, midrange, and high-end product segment. Sun's recently announced UltraSPARC IV processor boosts the price/performance ratio across the product line for servers and desktops. The new processor provides approximately 65% better performance based on average SPECint/fp_rate 2000 data. Because of the board upgradability from many UltraSPARC III-based systems, end users' and lessors' investments in hardware are protected. Especially for the midrange and high-end segments, the mixed-speed CPU support enables organizations to grow their IT infrastructure incrementally and increase processing power within the same footprint. The next major upgrade is expected in 2006 with the Rock processor. The lower-end servers will receive the Niagara processor, which will employ eight cores and four threads, commonly called "chip multithreading." Although applications to take advantage of this design are not yet ubiquitous, we believe many more applications will be optimized to take advantage of the multithreaded design going forward. In addition to board upgrades from UltraSPARC III and mixed-speed CPU support, Sun's midrange servers also offer investment protection through their Uniboard design, which allows customers to bring processor boards, the most expensive portion of the server, to the new system. Current systems that carry the Uniboard design are the Sun Fire 4800 and 6800, E12K, E15K, E4900, and E6900. TABLE OF CONTENTS
IDC OpinionIn This InsightSituation Overview- UltraSPARC IV Systems and Sun's Future Processor Plans
- Solaris Relicensing and Its Impact on Used System Values
Future Outlook- Table: Sun Microsystems Server Residual Value Forecast, January 2005 to January 2009
- Conclusion
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