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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."
so Sun will become Dell or HP???
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
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.
I know this is the wrong thread - but I am so happy to see healthy competition in the market place. Check out what is happening
- G5 vs. Opteron
- OS X vs. Windows
- Linux vs. Windows
- Mozilla/Firebird/Thunderbird vs. IE/Outlook
It is a good time for computing. Although, with Longhorn so far out (and no further IE improvements until then) I think the competition is going to be a little bit one sided.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
However, I AM currently accepting donations to NOT use Linux!
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.
So what does the 20+ years' lineage of the SPARC architecture represent, if not Sun's ability to successfully design, implement, market and deploy processors? Hello? McFly?
Edith Keeler Must Die
The question in my mind is are they going to use the full x86-64 extensions, or keep the sparc as the 'real' 64-bit processor and let Solaris x86 remain 32 bit...
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
and your posting on SlashDot. Your life sucks as much as mine.
:-)
that depends... which one (if either) of you is posting from work???
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Moving to Operton is a good move, but only after a serious of mistakes.
First mistake was in not encouraging 3rd party vendors to adopt the higher-end SPARC's, and ignoring the low-end SPARCs that used to dominate the embedded space. They had a strong position when they moved the SPARC architecture into the open, but lost it when they failed to support that initiative with bare-bones development machines.
Next mistake was creating Solaris for x86. Sun's logic was to hook folk on Solaris in order to get them to move over to their profit-making SPARC's. BIG MISTAKE. Instead, those SPARC vendors decide that they can instead move off of SPARC and keep using Solaris on the lower-cost x86 machines.
Final Mistake was Sun ignoring the low-to-mid range workstation market that they dominated during the 80's. Sun's focus on extreme-high-end servers cost them the middleware support that made Sun boxes worth purchasing in the first place.
This move to Operton might be the only step left for them if they are going to survive outside of a vertical market.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
but the reason I'm more interested in AMD's 64 bit chips instead of Intel's is the names. Intel's is the "Itanium" which sounds like a financial company's plan to expand their commodities market. Boring. AMD's on the other hand is "Opteron" which sounds like a massive and powerful, but benevolent robot who doles out justice all across the land with his fists of iron fury, protecting the interests of all well intentioned people.
This has been a very busy week for the Sun!
Cool funny t-shirts for geeks, gamers and everyone else
- G5 vs. Opteron, ok - OS X vs. Windows, where are the winshit improvements? - Linux vs. Windows, where are the winshit improvements? - Mozilla/Firebird/Thunderbird vs. IE/Outlook, No more IE releases until 2005, no more Outlook Express releases. The competition is one-sided in that Microsoft "ownz0rs" the desktop market. They can hold out for that long without anything new to throw in. In two years, they'll come along with a few new shiny tricks. Their software will still suck, but they won't lose any significant portion of the low-end market.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I too dream of the day when Apple's stranglehold on the high-end server market is broken. Hahahaha!!!!!
The advantages of the Sun Sparc systems is not price/performance but reliability and performance under load.
Sure Solaris is a dog on a lightly loaded system. But when your load average is sitting at 30, it's still performing near the same level. x86 boxes would fail under the load that Sparcs can hold up under.
And they're bloody reliable, and when they break, Sun's support contracts are excellent. Only HP and IBM compare on the support side, and only HP and IBM's RISC boxes compare on the reliability side (lord knows IBM's Netfinities don't.)
It's all about TCO in the end. You buy the sparcs less often, and they're cheaper to maintain.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
Sun Flares?
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.
There's so much more to system level than the base technologies. I had an opportunity years back to work closely with a systems shop, selling/supporting my chip design. I learned a lot about system-level performance and reliablity in that year-or-two, and realize that those folks had forgotten more than your garden-variety PC folks had ever learned.
Individual components and pieces of performance (CPU clock and IPC, for instance) are only part of the issue. System balance is important, and only learned with experience and sophisticated tools. True reliability is the same.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The first serious sign that McNealy & Co. are actually thinking. This could be positive for Sun if they execute it right...something I have my doubts about though.
Sun reminds me of Atari or Amiga from days past...great company with lots of innovative ideas, piss poor execution.
They really need to spell out the future for their customers, will they adopteron the Operon for all servers eventually or is this just a little hack to keep the analysts off their back.
If they treat this like their x86 servers with annoucements like:
"We'll sell you this x86 junk if you really want it, but if you want to do anything serious give us a call about our UltraSPARC servers running Solaris!"
Comments like that don't incite confidence that as a customer I'm going to get support. Or long term roadmaps.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Last October (2002) I was talking to some AMD folk, and they indicated Sun was on board. Over the past year, those ties have gotten stronger, and the two companies have been getting closer and closer.
:). The first box that should hit is a dual CPU 1U opteron box, with a 4 way to follow shortly after that. The interesting stuff follows those vanilla boxes.
There are a bunch of boxes on the drawing board, the ones they announced are just the first of many. The delay is that there is no real support for Opterons until they ship Solaris 10, which is due in the not to distant future. Until that OS hits, the Opteron support will be pretty half baked, just Xeon code, and no real use of AMD64 extensions.
That said, without trying to sound to much like a whiny martyr, I have been writing this stuff up for the last year on the Inquirer, just no one believed me
-Charlie
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.
-30-
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
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
You're not comparing the same numbers dipshit.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
so Sun will become Dell or HP???
I seriously doubt it.
1. Neither Dell nor HP has a high-end server operating system equivalent to Solaris.
2. Sun's hardware has been of a higher caliber and reliability. I have no reason to assume that they would put any less effort into their Opteron-based products.
3. Sun has never chased the consumer desktop market. You won't find a Sun for sale at Best Buy. Nor will you find pictures on Sun's web site of smiling, multi-ethnic families clustered around Sun machines on which the children are doing homework.
4. Sun has the technical know-how that neither HP nor Dell has. Sun continues to innovate while HP and Dell are content to sell cookie-cutter PCs. There's nothing wrong with the latter as a business plan, but it's a far cry from Sun's technical leadership role in the industry.
I'll be happy if Sun backs away from their SPARC CPU development. They don't sell enough hardware to cover the R&D costs necessary to make SPARC CPUs competitive against Intel, AMD, or even IBM offerings.
You are supposed to get reliabilty
-So multiple power supplies that can be replaced while the machine is running.
-The ability to turn off the power on a PCI slot, so a card can be replaced or added without a reboot.
-Even CPUs can be changed, hey OS stop using that CPU and hardware turn off the power it's acting up and we want to switch it.
-You also get hardware monitoring systems, so you get emailed when a power supply is broken.
In the last few years all these features have also shown up on intel server hardware. Linux and Windows software is also available from the vendors that rivals the sun stuff, in some cases exceeds it.
So maybe Sun is dead. I think Sun would be better served embracing Linux, and producing their own distribution which they could even call Solaris 11. In most of the companies these are critical systems, the money is secondary to the support, but Linux and Windows are unstoppible forces like the Intel architechture.