Sparcs fly as HP hits out at Solaris strategy

Hewlett-Packard has launched a blistering attack on Sun, claiming itson. rival's 64-bit Unix strategy is seriously flawed.

"Sun's stance was 'Intel over my dead body', but it has been forced to endorse ports to Merced," said Gordon Lovell-Read, HP's head of enterprise systems for the UK.

"Sun is taking a very narrow route, with no real Intel and NT strategy. It is boxing itself into a corner and, given this lack of strategy, it is easy to see Sun not being there in a few years' time."

Sun hotly denied these claims. "All this is absolute rubbish. The comments are so ludicrous, I really don't know what to say," said Julian Lomburg, Solaris product marketing manager at Sun's software division. "We have had a strong Intel strategy since the early 1990s."

Lovell-Read stated that HP was jointly developing Merced with Intel and that, in contrast to Sun, its existing Risc HP-UX Unix enjoyed full binary compatibility with the new version of Merced.

"Sun has major problems with its Risc Sparc architecture, which is big-endian. In order to get this to the little-endian addressing used by Intel chips, Sun's independent software vendors will need to go through the massive pain of recompilation."

Lomburg once again dismissed the claims. "There are over 3,000 independent software vendors writing code for both Sparc and Intel. They are separate platforms and nothing more than a simple recompilation is needed to transfer code. There is no pain here for anyone."

The attack came just as Sun announced that it would be intensifying its efforts to promote Solaris as a platform for independent software vendors by opening two competency centres.