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Sun Announces New AMD-Based Product Line

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the has-got-his-hat-on dept.

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.

2 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. Union of the underdogs? by Shutter_BC · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I've been an AMD fan for quite a while, as anyone who reads articles at Anandtech tends to become. This has been more or less already stated, but... where is this going to lead without a strong media presence or public interest? I wonder how Sun and AMD plan to educate non-techies and convince them that they're cool.

    I wish the both of them the best of luck, and one of these days, may good engineering prevail. I hope.

  2. Re:Who Knowns by digitalhermit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It could be one of those ideas whose time has finally arrived. My experience with Java hasn't been all that great. There are several competing Java VMs and each had idiosyncracies and problems that precluded the "write once, run anywhere" philosophy from actually working. Getting Java to work under Linux is not quite as simple as under Windows or MacOS, and messages on news groups, the Fedora Core lists, and in local LUGs attest to this.

    The latest releases are *much* easier, however. I downloaded and installed the latest Sun Java SDK on a Fedora Core 1 machine. The graphical installer put everything in /opt (not exactly LSB, but I can live with it) and exited. It didn't set JAVA_HOME or adjust any user PATH variables, but hunting through the instructions I was able to find the correct chapter (I knew this before reading, just wanted to confirm that they did say so).

    Now Java has always had this (perhaps undeserved) reputation for being slow. Not the case with Java/Fedora. Whether it's the NPTL that's part of Fedora or optimizations in the Java VM itself, the jar files I tried opened as quickly as natively compiled applications. Responsiveness was just as good. For the record I tried Jedit, Arachnophilia, Mindterm, WeirdX and a bunch of math/science applications for fractals, mapping, function graphing, etc.. Yes, a lot of the applications are already available natively under Linux, but the idea that I can move my desktop environment to anywhere without setting up automatic NFS mounts, playing with VNC servers, or fussing with roaming profiles is pretty cool.

    Now I'm not as big a Sun fan as I was five years ago, but I think this technology is pretty cool.