Sun to reveal all on ye olde APL shared-server plan

SUN ANNOUNCED its APL plan to unite Sparc-based server designs with those of Fujitsu way back on 1 June in 2004 when Britney Spears was singing Everytime and Morrissey had just released You Are The Quarry. Ronald Reagan was about to leave this earth, as was Ray Charles.

APL stood for Advanced Product Line but we forgave that stodgy literalism, imagining the prettified marketing tweaks would come later. The plan was to share processors and architectures to create a merged line replacing Sun Fire and FJ's annoyingly caps-locked PRIMEPOWER families. Why? To create economies of scale, natch.

There would be low-end, mid-range and high-end products, said Scott McNealy, who was still tending shop at Sun in those dark and distant days when Big Teeth ruled over Big Hair.

Now it's April 2007 and you have to spend 20 minutes on Google just to find out what was happening in this wicked world to build a first paragraph setting the scene for the time when Sun made the original APL announcement. All we've heard since are delays and updates on individual processors such as the chip codenamned Rock that reportedly taped out last December.

Or maybe, as happens in this PR-driven business all too often, Sun stopped using the APL name as top-level branding and the firm can find some way to argue that bits and pieces of the APL grand plan are already out there. Confused? Me too.

Let there be light. Sun has called a conference for on or near 18 April in wonderful New York, and the subject is APL.

An updated roadmap is the least we can expect but it would be surprising if some design goalposts haven't moved a little in the intervening years, perhaps relating to processor types, interconnects, multiprocessing configurations and other options. After all, since the APL announcement a lot of things have changed. Sun has slept with AMD, kissed Intel on the side, dived into the environmental debate, tried again in software, and said it wants to license more out of its microelectronics business.

And Britney? She ain't been doing so good… µ