Oracle: IBM, Come Out to Play-ee-ay

This is a great move by Oracle.

It used to be you doubled the speed of your computer by waiting 2 years and buying a new one, but that time has passed since we hit the limits of how much you can do with a single core.

Now, if you want to double the speed of a computer, you have to do more system-wide design-oriented things:

- add an H.264 decoder to the GPU
- replace Internet Explorer with Safari or Chrome
- get everything running x64 instead of x32 to get more registers and so on
- run more of your software code on the programmable GPU
- make sure everything runs parallel so you are hitting all your processor cores
- tune the whole hardware/software system for a specific task such as Web serving or video editing instead of for general purpose use

All of this also goes for when you want to double the battery life of a computer. All the same kinds of optimizations apply. The reason the iPhone gets much better battery life than all others is not just its large battery but also its very power-efficient core OS kernel that aggressively sleeps unused resources.

Oracle has a chance to do for the enterprise what Apple did for consumers over the past 10 years: create solutions instead of I-T work.