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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?
This is VERY interesting news since at this moment Sun is holding their Chip Conference where the future of Sparc is being discussed.
Now we can wait another 5 years for the new blade servers.
would have been more pun-worthy to have hammer/sickle than hammer/blade.
my bad. mod me down.
After years of touting its own UltraSparc processors as sufficient for all manner of computing, Sun last year bowed to market realities and accepted general-purpose Intel-compatible computers into its server line.
I *think* I know how the market will respond to this as far as AMD is conccernd, I'll be keeping an eye on what this does/means for sun.
Cringely seems to think that Sun won't last long though, so will there be long-term benefit to AMD?
...they are also making an UltraSPARC server blade.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Sun wants 64 bit capability to be a differentiator for Solaris. So they will not rush to use AMD's 64 bit offerings.
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.
Read Epic the first RPG novel.
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.
Nope, Its the smell of your Karma burning.
looks like sun is going for the underdog in both the os and chip markets with a linux/amd combo. could this be in response to some beliefs that sun is fading? obviously this is good for amd and linux, but what if sun really does go away? will people blame amd hw and/or linux sw?
USE='clever' emerge -u sig
Is it just me, or is 64-bit computing, the hammer, and AMD getting a lot of press for the past few days? I wonder if this is the start of a big media blitz.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Now we just need for linux to get good support for the 64-bit addressable memory (read: more than 4 gigs).
:Wq
Not an editor command: Wq
In any event, the Sun blades aren't in direct competition with commercial Linux offerings (yet), so I don't see how much this will help them. The inclusion of AMD CPUs will only marginally improve costs on the Blades.
Well, many researchers foretold Sun slowly to move to AMD as they enter the x86 market. You would expect that their next move will be low cost (low for Sun) Linux offerings with AMD chips to compete with IBM's $4,000 offerings.
I was just configuring Debian on a E450 dev box to bring our servers more in line with our production servers.
What does this mean for Sun? No one knows for sure. Is it the beginning of the end or a stop gap measure until their new processors come out in 2004. The ones all the analysts are so hyper over, not the USIV or USV but the Afara procs.
But what does this mean for AMD? Now every enterprise can ask the question, why not go with AMD? Sun uses their procs... why shouldn't we use them also.
This is just good news for AMD and may be a kick in the groin for Intel to wake up to the 64 bit to the desktop question.
Your mom always said, a PB&J is better than nothing, and God is nothing, is a PB&J better than God?
Honestly, I don't even know why that is funny here. I really don't think BSD is dead, and I have nothing against it . . . Slashdot is just really starting to effect me in strange ways.
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For instance, the other day I was making a little presentation to my boss and suddenly used the:
1.
2. . .
3. Profit!!
Step list . .
slashdot is going to get me unemployed and single.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
I've had a number of discussions with folks about this over the last few years.
1) Sun can still afford it.
2) They gain instant credibility in the x86 market.
3) AMD gains credibility in the enterprise (luring really big enterprise customers with real service)
4) Sun gets 2 of the leading 64-bit processor platforms, plus some control over the Windows hardware platform.
5) Sun gets to own their chip manufacturer (rather than rely on stinky TI and Fujitsu for the Sparc line).
6) Sun can control the cost of its Linux platform.
Do, it Sun. . . you know you want to. . . buy them.
They'd use AMDs to compete aggressively with IA64 offerings. As far as I'm concerned, this is Sun's only pathway to survival. Linux is killing their lowend Unix business. They should embrace Hammers and push the crap out of Linux boxes. I personally think they should put out Windows boxes as well but that's uncool to say here.
> ... they are probably preparing for the day when Solaris will be phased out.
They are in business, not gambling, so yes, they need to think about what if, but Solaris is still the core of Sun (like Solaris is the core of N1).
> Wow -- Sun is boosting Linux in a BIG way now.
Why not? Though they were cutting work force dramatically, they are still one of the biggest players in server market and if you look back for the last 10 years, they have achieved quite a lot. 10 years ago, they were nowhere. They were pretty interesting 5 years ago, and now they are competing with players like IBM with head to head, toe to toe. They don't have a big share in low end server market, so they push Linux. Since they built their business around Solaris (Unix), their engineers can easily shift to Linux; training cost is insignificant. So why not?
The negative shift from dot com bubble was so dramatic that, many seem to believe that Sun is turning around the direction that they are going, but I (and probably many other) don't think so. They are in server business, and they are investing a lot there. They established themselves as one of the biggest players in high end server market, so now they are targeting low end as well. While they pursue the whole server market, they push, what they call, N1.
The point is "What's so surprising? What's so unpredictable?"
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.
Because I doubt M$ would honor the 64 bit windows deal if Sun purchased AMD or maybe Sun could use that to pursue more legal manuvering.
XP2400+, an Asus A7N8X Deluxe, 1Gb DDR333, and a 120Gb HDD. I'd like to see any current Sun workstation beat this combo
I guess it all depends on what your terms are. Three years ago at work I was working with a simulation that took about 5GB of ram to run (1 process). All of the 2 year old Sun workstations we have now could run this. Sun had equipment, what, 7 or 8 years ago that could. Your PC still can't.
Your PC could no doubt render a beautify, a kick-ass Quake 3 scene. But it would probably suck wind trying to do certain types of CAD displays. It can be very different 3D work from what a PC graphics card is good at (textures & shading). Of course, for what its worth, Sun's new XVR-4000 graphics card can take up to 1GB of memory!
Your PC will be a lot cheaper, and kick-butt. However there are some things a Sun could do that it just couldn't, or would do poorly.
I've been watching Ebay for deals on Sun equipment and have never seen something that seems like a good deal.
It all depends what you are looking for.
Sun has used AMD CPU's before, although not in the primetime in their servers. They did use them in the SunPCi cards for workstations. I still have one.
The reason that Sun used AMD (the K6-2, I believe) instead of a Pentium, like they did with the SunPCi 2, is that at the time it made more sense price-wise. I see no difference here.
Contrary to popular belief, life is not a bitch. It is far far worse.
Also, 64 bit chips are not ready for the mainstream market yet. They need more testing, analyzation, and intrepration with an unbiased group of persons as the sample, to make reliable predictions.
Yeah, no one makes 64 bit chips that are ready to use.
Don't blame me, I get all my opinions from my Ouija board.
that will produce enough heat to be worthy of its namesake.
my pet machine
Look at all the non-reading fools posting...
These are the notebook AMD XP-M CPU's.
That means low power and heat.
It also means no 64bit support.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
Oh no, does that mean my 256-bit graphics card is going to explode?
What you mean is there's no real market yet for 64-bit Intel/AMD chips, sceptics don't think hammer will run 64-bit code as fast as Intel's offering and so there's no huge market. Itanium (or whatever they're calling it now) requires it's own nuclear power source so there's no market for that (who needs 64-but when you can cluster).
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
Moderate this thread or comment on it....hmmmm
I had to comment because I saw quite a few posts on the ability of Sun's slaes staff to reduce you too feeling like a non-human, loser who isn't worthy of their products because you are only spending 25, 50 or 75K worth of gear.
I work for an MSP and we do a lot of business with Sun (although we have sold more Dell/Linux solutions that Sun Solaris at the 3:1 ratio in the last 9 months). I am really tired of dealing with them. I even get attitude fromt heir teir 1 support! When a tier 1 peon asks me if I am sure that the drive is broken 3 times, and then tells me to get someone else to check it I get very angry and feel like cramming that drive down his stupid throat!
I mean really....I was supporting this stuff since before he was even a twinkle in his father's eyes. Am I not a repeat and well paying customer? Did we not spend several million dollars with Sun in the past? Do they not want to continue this relationship? I ask my sales rep these questions everytime I call....and he promptly hangs up on me.....BASTARDS!
"Laugh, and the whole world laughs with you. Cry, and they still think its funny." - Mr. Boffo