Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Sun Considers Opteron

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the workstations-on-the-cheap(er) dept.

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! "

7 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. Dupe, I think. by dschuetz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Here

    Whatever happened to those of us with acess to TMF being able to submit notice for pending dupes? I tried, but there's no easy way to figure out how to send a note to the editors. I still like the idea (naturally, since I brought it up) of a little form on TMF stories with the ability to submit dupe notification right then and there.

    Of course, if I'm wrong, then, fine. :)

  2. Back Door Linux Strategy? by cmehta1 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Is Sun going to Opteron a backdoor linux strategy in case hell freezes over and Sun decides to drop their Solaris all-together or straddle Solaris/Linux (again).

    With Linus saying he really likes 64-bit strategy of Opteron vs. Itanic, perhaps they want to keep their options open. See these articles:
    http://slashdot.org/articles/03/02/25/0 11217.shtml ?tid=142
    http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7966

  3. Serious Dupe Problem on Slashdot by elliotj · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I really don't know what Slashdot editors do, but if they're not reading the site on a daily basis, couldn't they at least search the damn site before they post to see if someone has beaten them to it?

    It's getting pretty rediculous. It wasn't always this bad.

  4. They can't beat them, so they're joining them! by NerveGas · · Score: 2, Interesting


    Sun has been hurting for a while - PC-based servers have been increasingly eating up Sun's market.

    The Opterons are aimed squarely at a market segment that was hitherto tied to Sun and one or two other companies. If you wanted a highly-scalable 4- or 8-way 64-bit machine, you bent over, and Sun/IBM/DEC found your bank roll along the way.

    Now, machines of those natures are coming from a commodity vendor. With a 128-bit DDR333 memory interface, each processer will have far more memory bandwidth than even the new Sun iiia's that were introduced today. And HyperThreading gives some pretty respectable inter-processor bandwidth. You think that Sun shouldn't be shaking in their boots? You bet they should.

    In the end, they know that they're not going to win the lower end of the market. They simply can't compete with the economies of scale that AMD and Intel enjoy. Embracing the future is their only way to ensure that they keep at least a portion of that market.

    steve

    --
    Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
  5. Idea for Slashdot by harlows_monkeys · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Make it a requirement for the people that approve posts that those people regularly read slashdot.

    Hell, I only spend a few minutes a day reading slashdot, and I have no trouble instantly spotting the dupes, so it wouldn't be too onerous a burden on your editors, would it?

  6. Re:More SPARC fud! by igiveup · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So what is your point? Who can afford a 256-processor machine other than a Fortune 100 company or the government?

    I ported my company's application to Solaris using gcc 2.95, cons and an Ultra 5. About 90% of our code is shared across platforms. One comparison would be compile times. To completely compile our application on my off-the-shelf HP 1.6GHz PC through VS .Net (not your snappiest IDE) takes 10 minutes, up to 15 if I'm doing a lot of other work at the same time. To do the same thing on the 900MHz Ultra 5 using gcc and cons on the command line takes 40 minutes. Even compiling under Linux using gcc and cons through a VMWare virtual machine on the same Windows box take less than 20 minutes.

    From practical experience the current single-processor Sun workstations pale in comparison to even the most basic current PC, running Windows XP or Linux (not Solaris Intel though, geesh that's a whole other painful story).

    --
    --- igiveup ---
  7. Re:difference from a PC by TheLink · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "Assuming you built the machine right so that no single board is a single point of failure, you hit the next problem: If a CPU or memory module were to actually fail during runtime, it is still just as likely to cause an OS crash. "

    Not if you buy a mainframe class system from IBM or the other genuine high end vendors, which have things like redundant CPUs running the same code. If there's an error, the CPUs retry. If still bad, then the offending CPU or module is shutdown.

    Consider Fujitsu if you still like SPARC, but want stuff like instruction retry.

    http://www.ftsi.fujitsu.com/services/press/illum in ata_10-11-02.pdf

    Look at the IBM mainframe culture and history:
    http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/4 35/spainho wer.html

    Sun is a mainframe wannabe with decent marketing. They really aren't that far ahead of Dell if you look at the big picture.

    Sun SPARC is actually lagging behind Fujitsu SPARC in performance and reliability.

    Not saying Sun is dead or dying. But it doesn't look good does it?

    --