Mountain View - SUN Campus, 15/11/95
"The Ultra Spark processor"
SUMMARY:
- Ultra Spark is a wonderful, powerful new processor which projects Sun
again into the lead in processing speeds. Intelligence will become ubiquitous throughout
the world economy with billions of super computers around the world (1).
- This changes the very structure of the world economy dominated by the law
of the microcosm. Hierarchies will give way to heterarchies, which are peer networks,
horizontally organised systems. This change will generate close to a trillion dollars of
new market value, the assets of computer and networking companies, network-centred
companies.The law of the microcosm is now being eclipsed by the bandwidth law, Metcalfe's
law, the inventor of Ethernet (2).
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INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Can you describe the new Ultra Spark processor?
Answer
Ultra Spark is a wonderful, powerful new processor, which projects Sun again into the lead
in processing speeds for at least a while. With this kind of processing you could put 192
Ultra Sparks on a single billion transistor chip. In other words, what's going to happen
is that intelligence will become ubiquitous throughout the world economy. There will be
eventually billions of super computers around the world and perhaps the digital cellular
phone with Java will epitomise it as we move into the next century, but there will be a
ubiquitous super computer power distributed everywhere and ubiquitous switching power. You
could put 21 DMS100 or ISS central office switches on a single billion transistor chip.
Question 2
What will be the effects on the world economy?
Answer
This is a remorseless centrifuge in the centre of the world economy flinging intelligence
to the fringes of all networks. It changes the very structure of the world economy
dominated by the law of the microcosm. What it means is that hierarchies, top-down,
master-slave systems of all sorts give way to heterarchies, which are peer networks,
horizontally organised systems. And this is true at Sun. It's true in the future computer
architecture, its' true for the entire world economy. Hierarchies give way to
heterarchies, where the power migrates to the customer.The change in the industry was the
first personal computer and it transformed everything during the 1980s. And the personal
computer created a global business worth about US$400 billion, all the PC companies and
suppliers together were worth about US$400 billion of market capital. And I believe this
change will generate at least twice as much, close to a trillion dollars of new market
value, the assets of computer and networking companies, network-centred companies. It
might even be enough to say IBM, Gerstner had a revelation last week, which he announced
to Business Week and they put it on the cover and his revelation essentially could be
summed up, Hey, the network's the computer! And Bill Gates recently had a similar
revelation that began about 9 or 10 months ago, he began to think these things through and
he said, Hey, the network's the computer! And some of us had heard that theme before. Sun
has just not been able to keep up with the demand that's been generated by this new
net-centric revelation and Java and all these new network-based products. And their server
has until recently had a T1 connected to it and it was almost impossible to get to it
because everybody was there. All this is really a symbol of this transformation that is
underway that really originates with the law of the microcosm which is the basic law of
this technology which says, you take any number n transistors and you put it on a
single sliver of silicon and you get n2 performance and value. That's an
exponential law at the basis of this explosion. And but the law of the microcosm is now
being eclipsed by the bandwidth law. And that's really Metcalfe's law, the inventor of
Ethernet. It's the law of the telecosm, which says you take any number n computers
of a particular power, and connect them on a network and you n2 performance and
value. So you have this exponential applying to networks. And bandwidth has been doubling
every year or so, so bandwidth is moving faster than Moor's law, than the law of the
microcosm. And while bandwidth has been doubling, the number of people connected to the
network and the power of the computers connected to the network have been more than
doubling every 6 months or so, so that you have all these exponentials of the law of the
microcosm, the law of the telecosm, all joining to invert the whole information economy.
And it is this technology inversion, whereby the networks truly become central.
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