Sun Considers Opteron

Sanjay writes "Official from Sun spokesman. Sun is considering using AMD's Opteron chip in a server it expects to deliver to the market shortly. Intead of fighting Win of Wintel (like Redhat is doing), Sun can choose to fight both with Linux AMD's servers and also fight with HP/IBM as Itanium is anyway a non starter. Sun can rise again! "

Comments

Re:Dupe, I think.

[barzok]

As I read it, the "dupe" was an unofficial speculation. This sounds as though Sun has made an official statement that the speculation was correct.

The Sun is Setting

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out the SPEC web site. The performance of Sun's SPARC processors is pathetic. Sun is forced to migrate to the x86 instruction-set architecture (ISA). Sun is forced to use Opteron or Xeon. The irony is that the Opteron, the descendant of the lowly 4-bit 4004 traffic-light controller, beats the pants off of the UltraSPARC.

The problem for Sun is that Linux on Opteron does not give Sun much in the way of profits because the profit margin is low and competition is fierce. Sun cannot compete against IBM and HP in this area. Worse, Sun has no services organization to make any money by helping its customers to use Linux on Opteron.

Anyhow remember that stupid comment by Scott McNealy, who claimed that Sun is a one system -- one OS and one processor -- company. Now, Sun is distributing 2 OSes and 2 processors. Read the article at the Economist web site . It says that Sun will lose out big time in the Linux marketplace.

The Sun is setting. Good Riddance.

Re:The Sun is Setting

[Waffle Iron]

The irony is that the Opteron, the descendant of the lowly 4-bit 4004 traffic-light controller, beats the pants off of the UltraSPARC.

I looked this into this topic a while ago out of curiousity. X86's are actually descendants of the Intel 8008 microcontroller, not the 4004. Today's x86 chips are still assembly-source compatible with the 8008 (not binary compatible; there were automatic tools available to convert 8008 source to 8080 source, for example).

Even though the 4004 was the first microprocessor on the market, the 8008 design was started at Intel prior to the 4004. However, that project was put on the back burner before the 4004 was developed. After the 4004 design was finished, work resumed on the 8008. The 8-bit 8008 and 4-bit 4004 CPUs were not source or binary compatible with each other. (Here is some more info.)

Re:difference from a PC

[chill]

You've GOT to be kidding? If you were running desktops or small workstations, maybe. But, servers?!

Ever hot swap a CPU on a SMP PC? How about adding a CPU or RAM module without powering down? Hot sawp PCI? How about 4-way machines scalable to 64-way? 64+ Gb of RAM? Terabytes of storage?

PCs are only starting to be able to compete in that market, which is why Sun, IBM, and HP still sell those types of machines.

If you don't need those types of options, then PCs are fine.