I hate to be critical, but some times something has to be said so folks know we’re paying attention.

New systems are available from Sun, the Sunfire X4140 and X4440… behold:

These systems are AMD Dual Core and presumably NVIDIA chipsets (an earlier comment by a read states its 4 GE ports are NGE). There is no press release that I can find! Joerg Moellenkamp blogs about it here, and the Sun “On the Record” blog mentioned it as well. I suppose this means I should dump the Sun.com RSS feed and instead use the “On The Record” feed instead.

Here’s what I find really disturbing about the X4140 and X4440 releases. These systems were clearly designed as Quad-Core AMD systems to compliment the existing Intel Quad-Core systems of similar design. This is further confirmed by the many statements on the product page about being upgradable to Quad Core. The question is… why release them now? Why not wait untill the Quad Cores are available and release then? I just don’t get it.

Another PR oddity was this: Sun Microsystems Announces MySQL 5.1, which includes this amusing phrase: “today announced the pending general availability of MySQL 5.1″. Must. Make. MySQL Press Release. Why?

There are more examples but I’ll stick with these two. The point is this… Sun has gone from a company that released in volume at the announcement, to a company that released prematurely (eg, the LOM debacle on the X4150’s), to releasing software and systems pre-emptively!

What is going on here!? I don’t want to slam Sun, heaven knows I’m still a fanboy, but honestly, does anyone know whats happening here? (I’ll follow this entry with a ra-ra pro-Sun one to balance my SMI karma. I hate looking negative, but damnit people.)