Sun May Use Opteron Chips

Runnin_Rob writes "CNET Nets.com is reporting that Sun is likely (not definite, but likely) to start using AMD's Opteron in the near future. The article also discusses how Linux is pushing for greater acceptability of Solaris x86 because 'All of the sudden it is OK to (put) something other than Windows.'"

Comments

Re:opteron form factor

[domninus.DDR]

Yes but the first ones wont ship with an agp slot :( I know arima and MSI have retail boards (soon?) availible. look here, about halfway down

Linux helping Solaris?

[stevens]

Not at my workplace. We're mostly a Solaris shop, but it's not buying us much. We have to load new boxen chock full of GNU software to make them comfortable to work on.

Much of our software is Java, C or Perl-based. The Solaris JavaVM sucks donkey dicks (it's no better than linux, anyway), we use GCC (not Forte), and our Perl is portable to linux with a single scp.

Solaris buys us performance on machines with more than 16 CPUs. But we don't have any! Anything that needs serious cycles goes on the S/390 or AS/400s.

When the leases come up, it will be interesting to see how many Solaris boxes go out, and linux boxes come in.

Re:Linux helping Solaris?

[Skapare]

Anything that needs serious cycles goes on the S/390 or AS/400s.

Either the apps you've deployed on those machines are more I/O hungry than CPU hungry, or you've wasted dollars on mismatched architecture. S/390 and zSeries (no comment on AS/400 since I don't really know that one) are great machines if you need absolute up time and fantastic I/O throughput. But for CPU power, while those machine do have some, they are not giving you the bang for the buck you can get with a farm of P4s or AMDs. So maybe the reason you do have those machines is for something other than, or in addition to, CPU power needs. Does your S/390 serve web pages? Is it running a database? Does it have a PCICA?

Re:Linux helping Solaris?

[Anonymous Struct]

We're in the same boat as you guys. We had a slew of Sun hardware that just didn't need to be Sun hardware. I like working with Sun, and I like working with Solaris, but I just can't recommend Sun for most things in our environment. The fact of the matter is that we get fantastic deals from Dell on x86 servers, and using linux, we can (and will) replace most Sun pieces in our infrastructure.

Like I said, I've got nothing against Sun. I like working with their hardware. But when my boss asks me 'how much will it cost?', Sun leaves me in a real bad spot. Now they've realized how much they've priced themselves out of markets like ours, and they're working on putting out reasonably-priced systems these days with things like this amd deal or by using standard-registered dimms that you can buy from third parties on the cheap. But it's too late, I think. We started migrating away from Sun a while back, and we're not going to swap vendors again now.

The bottom line is this: What is Sun going to offer me in the linux/x86 world that Dell (or insert your vendor here) isn't? Better support? Lower prices? Better hardware integration? Sorry, we've got all of that. Our core applications will continue to run on Sun hardware for the forseeable future, but the low/mid-range stuff is already long down the road of x86 and linux, and Sun was just way too late to the game.

Re:Linux helping Solaris?

[b0r1s]

Same situation, but we went with FreeBSD.

The OS is cleaner, the speed better (especially when you push the system, using close to max RAM, because the FreeBSD swapping alg. is smarter than Linux), and the ports and upgrading systems make the systems much easier to maintain.

Finally, FreeBSD has much better system documentation (manpages for EVERYTHING), and all of those 'linux only' applications can run (quite quickly) under emulation (even NVidia is finally catching up, with their binary drivers).

(I guess I'm a new resident FreeBSD fanboy - so be it)

This would

[abhisarda]

mean that Sun would probably phase out Intel chips in the next 1-2 years in its lower end Linux systems. They will move entirely to AMD for their 32 bit lower end Linux and 64-32 bit mid level systems.
Given that so many companies: Sun, IBM, Dell want to increase their 64 bit x86 offerings, Microsoft *will* have to work double time to speed up their version of 64 bit Windows.
Already 5 varities of Linux, 3 BSD's, IBM's DB2, CA Ingres and Oracle have confirmed firm support for Opteron. Delaying Windows for this segment will mean that as Opteron becomes popular in the coming months, Linux will become the dominant operating system. This will mean a further boost to Linux.
A few months back Sandia National labs signed up to put 10,000 Opteron's in a supercomputer named Red storm which is supposed to become operational in 2004.

Re:sounds concrete

[Jahf]

FWIW, Sun has a long-standing behavior of taking extra time to test new hardware, losing the cutting edge in favor of higher stability. "Near future" in this case probably means a year or so away.

The upcoming round of x86 servers that John Loiacano alludes to, which by the definition of "near future" are coming out in the "extremely near future", are definitely not going to be based on the Opteron. It has already been leaked that the servers will be Intel Xeon processors running at least 2.8Ghz speeds.

Just trying to clarify without being too specific :) since this reminds me a lot of the "leaked" specs on the Cobalt RaQ XTR, which about 2 weeks before it was released with Pentium 3 chips, was reported here that it would be using AMD Athlons (mostly because the RaQ 4 and Qube 3 had used AMD K6 chips and someone extrapolated Sun / Cobalt would continue to use AMD chips).

The x86 groups within Sun are relatively processor agnostic. They try to choose the best match for the product's price/performance. Sun currently has various product lines that use both the Intel and AMD x86 processors.

I've been following the opteron's and..

[Visaris]

I've been following the opteron's progress for quite a while now (3-4 months). Well, to be honest, I type "AMD" in the google news search and read anything that comes up everyday before I actually start doing any work. While SUN seems the be the largets potential supporter, Newisys, MSI, Appro International, smaller MB makers, and various vendors do seem to be giving good support. Even Microsoft has a working (I've seen some screen shots of a beta) version of windows for x86-64 called "Anvil" (Not yet released of course). Linux is up to speed, RedHat and SuSe and I don't know who all else has support. The chip isn't even out yet! I think things are going to work out for AMD and the Opteron/Athlon64. So far it seems like a good product, and I can say for meself at least that the delays only make me want one more.... If SUN jumps on the AMD wagon from the start as it looks like they're planning on, I think it may be what saves them.

w00t for AMD!