Sun Picks Athlon For Cobalt Servers

ncc74656 writes: "In this TechWeb article, AMD may have achieved one of its longtime goals of getting the Athlon into the server market. Sun's Cobalt division is set to unveil a single-processor Internet-appliance server next week that will use the Athlon. Since there's still no 760MP chipset, there won't be any MP Cobalt boxen for a while ... but not everybody needs MP, and this is still a step in the right direction."

Comments

Re:Cobalt Alternatives?

[cperciva]

Cobalt servers are expensive crap. Before you mod this down as flamebait, think about the following:

Say you've got $5000 to spend on a new server. You can get one of two 1U rackmounted servers:

Option 1: 450Mhz processor, 512MB RAM, two 5400RPM 30GB mirrored (RAID-1) drives, lots of free software.

Option 2: Two 1GHz processors, 1024MB RAM, two hot-swappable 10K RPM Ultra-160 SCSI 36GB mirrored (RAID-1) drives, and the identical free software.

Option 1 is a cobalt Raq. Option 2 is a Supermicro 6010L with 1GHz Pentium III processors, Supermicro certified memory, and IBM drives.

What it comes down to is that a $5000 Cobalt RaQ is a $1000 system with a $4000 name.

I'd say to build your own boxes -- I can't imagine anyone here would have trouble working where things go -- but if you don't want to do that, get systems from VA Linux or BSDI; as for software, take a look at webmin, there are very few server applications which do not have webmin plugins, and with webmin you can give restricted access to people as you see fit.

(OT: where did the bandwidth and server space come from, anyway?)

Athlon not a good choice?

[Codeala]

First, lets get this get of the way: I use an Athlon at home and a Pentium at work.

Many people (including myself) like Anthon because it is cheap and fast, more bangs for your bucks and all that; this is ideal for home user. However I see two things against using Athlon as a server: it uses more power and generates more heat.

Now in a serious server environment, it seems to me that money is probably not as big an issue, so this kind of negated one of Anthlon's main advantage over a Intel chip right off.

Secondly, assuming you have lots of servers in an enclosed area, heat is a big deal; you want good air condition system. A room full of Athlons is HOT. This further offset the "true" cost of using Athlon servers

Also since Athlons use more energy, it stands to reason that your UPS system will not last as long as a similar number of Pentiums if there is a problem. Now for servers, up time is very important (unless you run WinXX ;-), so this seems another strike against Athlon.

And finally like the article said (you did read it right?), Ahtlon don't have multi-processors support yet so that is another strike...

Don't get me wrong, I love my Athlon. But server may not be the right application for *this* generation of AMD chips. But AMD did promise support for multi-processors, low-energy chips soon, so there is still hope.

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heat & power Re:Athlon not a good choice?

[StandardDeviant]

Your observation that the Athlons use, on average, more power and radiate more heat than the comparable Intel processor is, from what data I've seen, absolutely correct. However, I don't think that they use more power or generate more heat than an Alpha processor (some of those guys get hot, as anyone who's ever not quite given an Alpha-attached heatsink enough time to cool down has discovered ;-) ). Alphas are fairly common in the server (and rackmount server) market. True, you probably wouldn't want to stick one in a 1U, but still... (I don't have any hard numbers, but I imagine that the Duron line is probably well suited to a 1U in terms of die size, power use, and heat profile, given a well-designed case at least.)

If there is anything that will hold the Duron/Athlon/Thunderbird line back from server-market acceptance (technical reason, not Intel-ism in IT depts.), it would be the comparatively small cache sizes. I.e. you'll probably want to use an UltraSparc-based solution with (2-8) megs of cache per chip (or some other "big cache" arch like Alpha) for the DB server[1], but everything else (www, mail, etc) is just fine with the "small" x86 machines, a domain in which ceteris parabis Athlon would win over Pentium by virtue of decreased cost for similar of greater functionality.

[1] of course there are many other factors that go into making a mid-to-high-end DB server, but I/O and backplane bandwidth do play an important role; having large chip caches and >32bit architectures helps this quite a bit (the other main area is of course disk, but that's outside the topic at the moment)

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