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Sun To Build Opteron Servers
geekee writes "According to an article at CNET, Sun is planning on creating Opteron-based servers. These are expected to include 2-processor and 4-processor models running either Solaris or Linux. This move isn't surprising, given the performance and cost gaps between the Opteron and UltraSPARC processors. A move to Opteron would allow them to be more competitve in cost and focus more on what they're good at, designing systems, not processors."
They know that linux is the future-- Sun is simply adapting to survive. Both it and Opteron are more cost-effective than UNIX and SPARC, respectively.
Who cares?
That $10,000 will still be running, with full hardware support 5 years from now.
You'll be lucky to be able to buy ram with a warantee for that Opteron. Which will probably ahve bit the dust from component failures anyways.
Now a $5,000 Opteron or G5 on the other hand...
Just remember your cheap-ass desktop components may stand up to 3-4 years of mild desktop use, but the same components will die much quicker in a server.
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I, for one, think this is a smart move on Sun's part -- and hopefully a key move as part of a strategy to make Sun successful in the Unix market of the 21st century (you know, the one where people want and use Linux on commodity processors).
Opteron is a great choice. Not only is it technologically superior to Itanic, but it allows Sun and AMD to work together to keep Intel at bay. What's good for Intel usually ends up being good for Dell and Microsoft -- not Sun. Plus, Sun gets to save face by not having to turn around and say "uhhh... ok, maybe Intel isn't so bad after all."
All Sun has to do now is execute this properly, sell the products at a reasonable price, and stand behind a solid dual Linux/Unix strategy the way IBM and HP are doing. The toughest part will, of course, be keeping McNealy's big mouth closed.
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For the moment, I won't gripe too hard about 'shifting from PPC back to commodity hardware.'
But if you then say ANYTHING about IA-64, I'm going to jump down your throat with lawn aerators on both feet.
Be cautious about what you call commodity and what you call proprietary.
Just because a lot of something is made doesn't mean it's not proprietary.
Just because it's low volume doesn't mean it is proprietary, or not a commodity.
IMHO, Intel is only kept in check pricewise, by the presence of AMD, to a lesser extent, Via and Transmeta, and to a still lesser extent by PPC and other 'non-commodity' processors.
IA-64 is simply THE MOST PROPRIETARY processer there is. It's IP is held by a separate company, licensed to Intel and HP, so that prior contracts those two have don't give anyone else IA-64 access. The PII bus was patented, the PIV bus is patented, SSE (and/or SSE-II_ is patented.
They're perfectly within their rights to do this. But then you have to watch what you call 'closed' and 'open'.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Look, Sun makes great hardware above the low end, but an old K6-2 beats a Blade 100 desktop in perceived performance and compile speeds. The IIe chip is low power -- in more ways than one. If you don't have a CPU-bound process, like say, a web server for mostly static pages, a Netra X1 or V100 works great, but it's not a fast CPU.
OK. Price/performance. Let's see. SPEC2000 results, Sun Blade 100 (650Mhz US IIe, fastest IIe available in a system) gets 246 integer, 276 floating point. An Opteron 146 (2.0Ghz), on an Asus SK8N board, gets 1262 integer, 1300 floating point.
Just in case you meant the US IIIi, as used in the new V210, V240, V250, and Blade 1500, the results on a V210 (server chassis, 1002 Mhz) are 555 integer, 841 floating point. If and when Sun can get the IIIi up to 2Ghz, that would not quite match the Opteron for integer ops, and just beat it for floating point. Of course, by that time, the Opteron will probably be up to 3Ghz and smoke any available IIIi.
Any more bullshit to sling about price/performance?
Benchmarks from www.spec.org, as published by the vendors. Configurations of the boxes are detailed there.
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Sun really is good at designing processors. It's just that because Intel won the volume war because it happened to be the processor for the peecee, it was able to scale up manufacturing to cut prices even more, and sell to PHBs who care about price, not quality. Had IBM gone with the Motorola 68000 back when the first PC came out, which almost happened, we would see a totally different landscape today, where Intel would have probably gone the way of companies like National Semiconductor or Zilog. Imagine the first Linux kernel could have been written for an architecture with 4 times the registers. But alas, today, perhaps our only hope to remove the x86 plague is the PPC.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars