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

Dupe Dupe Dupe...

[dark-br]

And maybe we should change that slogan, what about:

News for the amnesiac. Stuff that mattered

Intel

[ralico]

After hearing that Microsoft is going to use it, and Now, Sun.
So when is Intel going to use Opteron?

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.

Re:following suit

[coutch]

April 8: Sun may use Opteron
April 9: Microsoft commits to Opteron
April 10: Sun considers Opteron
Who's following who ?

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

[cactopus]

It never ceases to amaze me how ill-informed people are. Sun has been battered heavily in the stock market, but they aren't "drying" up. There is no way PC architectures will replace "real computers"...they just aren't made to do that kind of job properly. If you're going clock for clock on silly single-user apps, maybe but when are you going to find a partitioned 512 processor PC (in one box) that heals itself and scales as well as Starfire. x86 is junk pure and simple. Opterons are being considered by Sun in the same way as Intel procs made their way into Sun's product list in the form of Cobalt. Sun isn't replacing Sparc with Opteron... that would be utterly retarded and Sun isn' retarded like HP is (read scrapping Tandem, PA-RISC, and Alpha for an unproven architecture that they don't control). Check out the specs on the USIV. Opteron is all about migrating customers off of 32 bit machines onto the Solaris platform. It is a step up to Sparc. Sparc based systems have been 64 bit since Solaris 7 and the Ultra 1 140. That's roughly 1995 or so.

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.)