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."

Comments

Also on Ars Technica

[Hyperbolix]

This was on Ars Technica today. Check it out:
http://arstechnica.com/archive/news/1046147898.htm l
A somewhat different interpretation of the meaning?

The weird part...

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the stock listings after today's announcement...

Sun Microsystems | SUNW | 3.42 | 0.01
Advanced Micro D | AMD | 5.31 | -0.08

Re:The weird part...

[Derkec]

The market was down 2.7% that day. Both stocks outperformed the market.

another proof point that Sun is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sun wants Solaris to be known as the 64 bit OS

[BrotherPope]

OTOH who is going to try to make a go of AMD/64? For sure not any of the system vendors who have commited to IA64. That means no Dell, no IBM, no HP. So there is an opportunity for Sun.

While there are no announcements out of Dell yet, Infoworld published this article back in November, saying:

A high ranking executive at a Dell partner has said, on condition of anonymity, that Dell will likely ship an Opteron-based server manufactured by Newisys Inc. Both Newisys and Dell are based in Austin, Texas.

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.

Re:Lower cost overall?

[glwtta]

On the low end Sun servers cost $250,000 (unless you cut a deal), while IBM Linux servers that can accomplish much of the same tasks as the Sun equivalent run you roughly $4,000 (unless again, you cut a deal)

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.

Re:Good news for Linux

[Monkelectric]

I used to work for a university, and made $100k+ purchases from sun from time to time ... However most frequently we were buying computers in small lots as we could afford to replace them (5 - 10k at a time), and lemme tell you, their sales reps have a *serious* attitude problem. I once had to call the regional manager because our assigned rep *wouldn't take our calls*. However, when we trotted out a 100k purchase they were all over us. I can't wait to see these bastards go out of business.

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?