Sun Announces New AMD-Based Product Line

Transfan76 writes "Today Sun Microsystems has officially announced an alliance with AMD. They "have formed an alliance to deliver a broad range of AMD Opteron[tm] processor-based systems, Sun also announced it plans to offer its Java Enterprise System on the AMD Opteron processor and is significantly extending the reach of its Solaris Operating System (OS) and leadership in the 64-bit space." You can read the official press release from Sun here. And the AMD release here." We previously reported rumored plans to this effect a few days back.

Comments

good for AMD, but Sun is doomed anyway

[penguin7of9]

This is good for AMD, giving them additional credibility and sales in the short term. But it doesn't address Sun's long-term problems: they aren't competitive in terms of hardware and they can't make money from Java.

Re:good for AMD, but Sun is doomed anyway

[RevMike]

And at least the *real* performance of Opteron is a refreshing change from the old Sun habit of relying on myth and illusion to sell their hardware. Now they reserve that role to the OS alone, we'll see how long that will last ;-).

SPARC is not a speed demon. For a long time now, lots of "commodity" CPUs have been more impressive performers, especially when one considers price/performance ratios. The benefit of Sun hardware for many years now has been in the IO subsystems. Fiber based drive arrays and the like are far more valuable for many purposes than fast chips. Database hosting, for example, relies far more on large memory for caching and fast disk subsystems than on fast processors.

Hopefully, for Sun's sake, they'll abandon their losing CPU business and concentrate on making making hardware that supports parallelism and high speed disk arrays. It would be nice to be able to buy a box with 106 2GHz Opterons, a hundred GB of Ram, and a few TB of lightning fast disk.

Who Knowns

[Anonymous Coward]

The Java Desktop they could create some serious revenue. Imagine a large company with Opteron workstation for engineering and scientific appilcations and SunRays as e-mail/web/StarOffice boxes.

Sun, the company who is now renowed for their expensive systems could use "commodity" computing to bring themselves back and Linux to the desktop. Who would have thought.

Re:Who Knowns

[Krondor]

Sun, the company who is now renowned for their expensive systems could use "commodity" computing to bring themselves back and Linux to the desktop. Who would have though

Great plan, but there are a few points. Sun appears to be an hour late and a dime short. They are finally doing now what they should have done two years ago. Their stock is in ruins, their founders have split with their pensions, and all that is left is the heaping ruins of a giant that moves to slow to avoid extinction.

If I were Sun I would have jumped quick when VA Linux came on the scene, but they ignored their obvious eventual competition (that being Linux replacing Unix) and focused on their cash cow. Now they seem set to pay the ultimate price (for a corporation that is). It's too late for them to focus into Linux the way they should have, and now they have Novell to contend with. Moving to Opterons is definitely a step in the right direction, but what can their systems do that others can't for less?

Java was a wonderful language (and still is), but I fear Microsoft's smear campaign and broken Java plugins have convinced enough people that Java is bad. It really appears that C#, .NET (Mono), and Virtualization layers might actually win.

A Pity

Re:Who Knowns

[Anonymous Coward]

I have one, and only one question for you: Since Linux hasn't taken over the desktop and 64 bit Linux hasn't taken over the server world why is it too late for Sun?

Oh yes, and as for Java check some job sites and compare the numbers (.NET vs Java).

Re:Why AMD?

[ajiva]

That doesn't even make sense! Java is a language, not an OS! Yes these systems will have Java installed on them, but so will StarOffice, GNOME and other pieces of software. The reason why Sun went with the Opteron is simple, they can present a unified software solution to the customer. Run Linux or Solaris in 64bit mode no matter how large the machine is. Whether its single cpu Opteron, or 64way SPARC box. Makes alot of sense...

IBM and now Sun

[Euphonious Coward]

With IBM shipping Opteron boxes, and now Sun announcing, it seems the Opteron architecture probably has legs. When HP announces, all doubt will fade.

(If you never had doubts about Opteron's ultimate prospects, consider Alpha. It had more going for it than Opteron ever did, and generations earlier. Current Alphas (EV7 and EV79) are fully competitive with current Opteron and Itanium, even without a proper engineering team for several years, yet the Alpha is "dead".)

Intel could do a lot worse than to revive it. It may need to, to stay competitive with Opteron.

Re:IBM and now Sun

[mr_majestyk]

When HP announces, all doubt will fade. Not very likely. That would seriously confuse their customers, given the enormous investment HP is making in Itanium.

Re:IBM and now Sun

[Euphonious Coward]

"given the enormous investment HP is making in Itanium"

Exactly. HP will be the last major manufacturer to announce Opteron servers. They will only do it when market pressure grows too great not to.

Recall that HP just spent enormous capital (of all kinds) absorbing Compaq. They don't have much of a cushion to ride out the Itanium failure. Therefore, they may well be forced to field Opterons despite their misgivings. When that happens, that will be the final imprimatur for Opteron.

By then, maybe Alpha will have been revived, and maybe G5 or G6 will be making a good showing. As Linux moves up the food chain, the artificial concentration on a single architecture, as enforced under MS's hegemony, will begin to melt. When only habit, and not market forces, make you choose x86, then price, performance, and secondary criteria like reliability, power management, and responsiveness to market demand start to matter more.

Re:IBM and now Sun

[_fuzz_]

[Alpha] had more going for it than Opteron ever did, and generations earlier.

Maybe from an engineering perspective, but one thing Opteron has that Alpha doesn't is compatibility with existing x86 applications. That's going to mean a lot to a lot of people because they think it will reduce the cost of a transition. Whether or not it is actually cheaper is irrelevant if customers think Opteron will make it cheaper.

Excellent!

[painehope]

The AMD64 ( or x86-64, whatever we're calling it this week ) architecture is very promising, and Sun is still an excellent vendor ( despite numerous blunders...they've made some horrible mistakes, but they've also had some great successes ).
This has the potential to breathe new life into both vendors, and gives us all an alternative, which is important in a marketplace that has such a dynamic history but is currently being choked to death by certain vendors that think marketing is more important than quality.
Now who should I get my next worksation from, IBM w/ SUSE or RHWS, or Sun w/ their desktop Linux stack? Hmm...

Re:Why AMD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus, why would a company need all 64 bit desktops?

Think McFly!

Re:Why AMD?

[digitania]

Yes. In my opinion that this is a last-gasp effort by Sun. Their failure to remain competitive in a market moving towards more open standards and interoperability - in other words, their priggish adherence to their outdated business model - has brought them (literally) to their knees (begging at AMD's door for a non-SPARC CPU to compete in the Linux market) in an attempt to appear to have a competitive platform. IBM's e325 (Opteron) announcement and subsequent performance had to be a revelation... What I'm going to be most interested in seeing is whether or not HPaq jumps on this bandwagon. Since HP was so integral to the Itanium design (and HPaq has really staked their entire future on Itanium) and Compaq had and sold Alpha to Intel (another subject into which I will not venture)... it's interesting, at least. I will be very surprised if they do, since they seem to be indexing everything they do these days to Dell (ask your friendly HPaq rep what their future in the 8-way Xeon space is...).

Re:Sun also announces 0.5-1m desktop win in China

[rihock]

The Java Desktop is nice, don't get me wrong. But, I look at the Solaris desktop, running on probably the best implementation of Unix, and all I see is a crap GUI. I think Sun should develop a better interface for the solaris desktop---if apple OS X can run on BSD, then Sun should be able to make something just as killer for Solaris

Re:Sun is going to have a hard time...

[_UnderTow_]

I don't know what you were doing wrong, but i've build HUNDREDS of machines based on AMD products, from Duron 700's to current generation Athlon XP/MP's. I have NEVER had a problem with one of their chips. If your fan is locking up you might want to look into your environment. Where do you have the damn servers, in a woodworking shop or something?

Re:Why AMD?

[oldmanmtn]

There probably isn't a whole lot of reason to not choose Intel, other than the fact that Sun operates on religious principles rather than business ones.

Opteron is cheaper, faster, and requires less power than Itanium. AMD's 64-bit ISA is a hell of a lot cleaner than Itanic's. And AMD appears to be making the switch to 90nm technology faster and better than Intel, which will further help their power/cooling story.

Re:AMD SPARC?

[swordgeek]

Sadly, I agree with you for the most part.

If Sun can come out with a 2GHz UltraSparc IV by the end of next year, they'll at least be back in the workstation market. (2GHz USIV will approximately compare to a 6GHz P4.) As far as true innovation at Sun, there are three things which MIGHT pan out into a quantum leap like they've pulled off before.

1) Throughput computing. Actually having a complete system (processor, RAM, I/O, video, and all busses) built together to efficiently stream data from any one end to any other might offer big advances. Possibly. Perhaps.
2) "N-1." If Sun can actually pull off computing as a commodity (even though they vehemently claim that that's NOT what they're doing), they might appear as visionaries, yet again.
3) Um, I can't remember the third one. Maybe just two ways out for them, then.

Benefit: Optimized Java VM

[carbon60]

The obvious Good Thing about this announcement is that SUN will need to provide a heavily optimised, 64-bit Java implementation for the Opteron.

Re:This is the beginning of the end for Sun

[Corpus_Callosum]

Their only strength was hardware and support. Now they will ship commodity hardware and compete with a company that kicks ass in support (IBM). I kinda feel sorry for them, they should have fired Scott McNealy LOONG time ago.

Not true. It's not like Sun is going to stop doing what it normally does. It is simply expanding it's product offerings in the same way that IBM has.

People that were going to buy AMD or x86 now have the option of going with Sun, where they would have had to chosen a different vendor before.

Re:Is Solaris on AMD the next to be canned?

[natd]

Certainly I understood at the time (2001?) that x86 support was at an end. I use Solasis 8 to run Oracle - and within a few weeks of learning that Solaris for intel *looked* to be finished, I had Oracle for Linux media on my shelf as a contingency.

As it turns out, Sun did release Solaris 9 for x86...and I stayed on Solaris 8 anyway.

I guess that's is the beauty of an open market where we aren't cornered into a propriety solution. If one vendor does something we really don't like we have options.