Multiple Personality

We don't have a shared, multi-machine architecture with SQL Server, at least not in the shared-nothing model that I've seen proposed by some people and is what some database systems use.

Cray announced they're building a new supercomputer that can use multiple CPU architectures, essentially combining separate platforms into one large computer. I guess that depends on how you define platform. So for this Friday's poll, what do you think?

Should Windows be ported to other chipsets?

Some of you might remember when Windows actually did run on multiple chipsets. At least Windows NT, the server based versions. There was a time when you could get not only Intel x86 versions of Windows, but also Alpha, MIPS, and POWERPC versions. There was even a SPARC version for a short period of time. Those died out, with the Alpha being the last remaining version until that chipset was abandonded after Compaq bought DEC (anyone remember DEC?)

There's a lot of effort that would go into porting the software to other architectures and for sure most of the other major chipsets out there are for servers, selling relatively low volumes. However with the advent of Linux running across so many platforms, is there a reason to do this and perhaps spur additional sales? Would it make sense to get the SUN or IBM chipsets running Windows?

Or do we just concede to Intel and it's imitator AMD?

Right now there are essentially 3 versions of Windows, the 32-bit X86, the 64-bit x64, and the Itanium IA-64 (which will die out soon). I'm not sure to what extent it matters if Windows runs on other chips, but just like I'm not thrilled with Google trying to monopolize search (it's good to have Yahoo and MSN out there), or Windows being the only desktop (I like seeing OS X and Linux doing well), I don't want to have only Intel making all the chips. I think there are benefits to having 2 or more major competitors.

Steve Jones

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