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

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: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?