Sun says HP "systematically misleads" customers

HP IS systematically misleading customers by claiming that UltraSPARC-IV (US-IV) is simply two UltraSPARC-IIIs (US-III) repackaged, and using this premise and derivative math to knowingly misrepresent facts. US-IV is the first of a new generation of processors from Sun designed to increase system performance exponentially, unlike PA-8800 which is the penultimate processor in a line that HP has already decided to end of life.

And the numbers do prove the advantages of US-IV systems over US-III systems. In order for HP to make their claims look more credible they choose to mislead them by claiming that US-IV is in fact just two US-IIIs put together and then putting all the Sun numbers on a per processor basis. This gives them what they need, but completely overlooks the important issue which is system performance.

The fact is that a Sun system with the same number of US-IV system boards as a Sun system with US-III system boards will be approximately 80% faster. In contrast HP on its own admission claims a PA-8800 based system is only 48% than a PA-8700 based system, despite a 15% faster clock speed, a 33% increase in L1 cache, addition of L2 cache, and peak bandwidth increased by a massive 300%.

Let's break it down a little further. On the topic of performance, HP presumably chose the best representation of performance increase for the PA-8800 and only reported a 48% increase for the SPECjbb2000 benchmark for a 32 way system. They then, somewhat disingenuously, arbitrarily decided to cut the SAP user count in half for the Sun US-IV system using their convoluted logic that US-IV is really two US-IIIs. In fact if one was to replace all of the US-III system boards in Sun system with US-IV system boards one would get an SAP user count of 10,100 vs 5,775 an increase of 75% and not a decrease of 15% as HP would have you believe.

And that's just the math. In terms of the big-picture view for customers, consider the following:

US-IV is part of a well documented roadmap to the processors of the future and PA-8800 is the penultimate iteration of a chip that HP is killing.

US-IV, although an evolution from previous generations, is part of the changing paradigm to systems using advanced concepts like chip multi-threading, and highlights Sun's ability to introduce new technologies while protecting customer investments.

Unlike HP which breaks everything when it moves to new processors (PA-RISC to Itanium), Sun maintains compatibility with previous generations so customers investments in applications, system software and hardware are protected.

HP systems are incapable of mixing and matching PA-8700 and PA-8800 system boards, whereas Sun customers can readily mix and match US-III and US-IV.

Good system design means Sun customers are spared the expense and inconvenience of taking their systems down, tearing them apart, replacing ALL of the system boards and most of the internals, unlike HP.

HP customers have to bear all the cost, inconvenience, expense and risk of upgrading their HP systems to the new PA-8800 system boards. And once they have done this, certain functionality, like vpars, available with PA-8700 system boards will no longer be available, plus the operating system, HP-UX11i, still cannot scale beyond 64 processors.

The choice for customers is simple -- do you go with the vendor that is already working on the future of computer system design with backward and forward compatibility, Sun, or do you choose a vendor who has already announced the end-of-life for many of their major system architectures (NSK/MIPs, Tru64/Alpha and HP-UX/PA-RISC), and abdicated future development responsibility to third party vendors, HP.

HP owes customers an answer to the question, that if they chose a PA-8800 based system, would it be binary compatible with future generation of HP systems that will offer multi threading based AMD or Intel processors, or is it a dead-end system. If HP answers the question honestly, the answer will be "No"! In which case why would one choose them as a vendor.

The choice is clear. If you want to maximize your investment, ensure the future viability of your systems, need a proven track record of compatibility, access to the largest library of ISV applications, and a history of innovation, then choose Sun, as it is the only vendor who offers this.

Mark Richardson
Sun Microsystems