Slashdot Mirror
Sun To Use AMD Mobile Processor In Blade Servers
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like AMD is finally making some headway into supplying 1st tier business computer makers which the announcement that Sun will use their chips in upcoming blade servers. Apparently CNET can't help but speculate what this means for AMD's 64 bit Hammer."
This was on Ars Technica today. Check it out:m l
http://arstechnica.com/archive/news/1046147898.ht
A somewhat different interpretation of the meaning?
Sun still talks out of both sides of it's mouth. In one breath they make claims that the UltraSPARC cpu is the most competitive CPU known to mankind, and in the next breath they're releasing non SPARC based systems, LX50 (Intel XEON) and AMD based blades.
Sun CPU engineers are way behind their competition. They're so far behind that their competition is litteraly lapping them in terms of price and performance.
Try and find any decent Sun server benchmarks that prove that their gear is competitive.
You can actually find benchmarks that one can make the direct comparison of an 8 way UltraSPARC 3 to a 4 way Intel Xeon MP! And the Intel based solution is faster and costs 50% or less.
Sun by virtue of their ego is becoming a boutique server/workstation vendor. Think SGI, this is likely Sun's future or worse if they don't start laying more staff off.
Businesses are realizing this, and this is why Sun is taking such a beating.
It's a crappy hack on Linux because it's a crappy hack on the archetecture itself. The limits of 32 bit addressing happens to be about 4 gig and to get more than that you get to use an EMS like thing that expands the address to 48 bits by paging things in and out of the 32 bit addressable space. By limiting each process to 4 gig they avoided having to pull off an even uglier hack that would have been required to export PAE to userspace.
Don't expect Linux to be any less ugly about something that works in a completely different way from how everything else does.
While there are no announcements out of Dell yet, Infoworld published this article back in November, saying:
The Register published their take on the situation. It may never come to pass, but I'd be surprised if Dell wasn't at least looking at such a plan.
But Solaris has the equivalent of smbmount. Take /windows on my Solaris 10 (heh) machine:
/dev/dsk/c0d0p0:c /windows /windows
a look at man pcfs. The following command mounts
my Windows partition (gotta play half-life, right?)
under
# mount -F pcfs
# ls
AUTOEXEC.BAK Games N2PActiveX.log Program Files
CONFIG.BAK My Documents N2pInst.log SCANDISK.LOG
CONFIG.SYS My Music NVIDIA WINDOWS
#
Works in Solaris 8 and 9 as well....
Whaa? I recently bought a SunFire 480 (definitely the "low end") for work, came out to about $23K, just for shits and giggles I just went over to dell.com and priced out a similarly configured (more or less the same, the processors probably have a bit more horse power to them) PowerEdge 6650, which came out to $22,780.
Oh sure, I could've gotten a 2650 with considerably faster CPUs and 50% more RAM dirt cheap (and in fact, we just purchased a couple of those as well), but for some reason if I need it to be expandable beyond 2 processors and six gigs of RAM it's just nowhere as thrifty all of a sudden. Not to mention that with the 26XX's the thinking is pretty much: "If it breaks - we chuck it and get a new one." and you can't really afford that for all applications.
as Linux tends to make huge leaps and bounds in a short time while Sun usually just tweaks a few interest points at a time
You do realize that you've just made the case for Sun (hands down) for anyone who is actually in a position to make purchasing decisions for a company? Explain to me the difference between "improves daily" and "has a long way to go".
Mind you, I love Linux and use it extensively (at work and at home), but that is no reason to just make things up about Sun's software or hardware.
sic transit gloria mundi
If you can get assigned a rep, the best thing to do is call 1-800-iforgetsunsphonenumber and get a quote, their tracking system will automatically notify your rep that you got a quote and usually they'll call you to try to get a comission on an easy sale.
However, have you considered ebay or one of the MANY sun resellers?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Actually it's not that hot. They chose AMD's Mobile processor for their Blade systems because the mobile gave of relatively little heat. I believe the number was around 30 watts. Granted, the blades will also be offered using Sun's own Ultra Sparcs which give off only 18 watts, but compared to other AMD and Intel offerings, the Atholon-Ms are pretty reasonable.
Unfortunately, the stupid slashcode would not allow me to post a legit comment regarding processor thermal power. So I have put it in my journal. You can find it here. Sorry for the inconvenience. I spent over an hour compiling this information to see this comment from slashcode "Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 14.7)". Fsck you slashcode!
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty