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The Return of the Sun Workstation, With AMD's Help
Hack Jandy writes "Would you be surprised to hear Sun is the lowest cost Tier 1 dual-Opteron provider? AnandTech benchmarks Sun's newest w2100z and includes some sneak peaks at Solaris 10 and Java Desktop System 2. The biggest surprise at the end - it costs less than IBM and HP's configurations. Has Sun learned from the demise of SGI workstations that relying on one processor architecture is harmful?" CrzyP adds "They perform various benchmarks including 2D/3D rendering, compiling, encryption, and thermal and noise performance, and compare the 64-bit Sun box with various other configurations, including varying operating systems."
The lesson I'd learn from SGI is that jumping into the WinTel server market is harmful.
The title is a little interesting to me. The Return of the SUN Workstation. Does this mean to say that the current versions of UltraSPARC and Sun Blade systems shouldn't be considered workstations? What do we (as a /. community) describe workstation as, anyway? Do we mean to say really high end 3D work in CAD/CAM, etc? Is the lowly XP machine I'm forced to use at work a "workstation" because it's where I get work done?
The new Java Workstation series with the AMD Opteron processor is a pretty neat box. Hit SUN.com and download their PDF's on the machine. One includes a diagram/schematic of the motherboard. The motherboard is the mainboard and daughterboard. The daughterboard happens to house the PCI bus and associated gear as well as the SCSI adapter onboard. I wonder why. Will SUN later introduce a different daughterboard with some other version of expansion upgradability? Maybe with SATA instead of SCSI? Just a way to keep the mainboard more flexible?
It also needs to be said that this isn't just a dual Opteron machine. There is a single proc version of the motherboard. They are also as full on x86 as you can get. No really out there ROMs or chips that only SUN knows about, because they are rated to run Windows as well.
So the units will run all x86 OS's without a hitch, they just happen to have some SUN engineering behind them as well as the SUN name. I think the main push for the Opteron was that they have an entry level server built around it. SUN knows that not everybody buys really high end multi $$K machines and that some data centers only need one or two sub $1K servers.
Is this why SUN is so vocal about their new found friends at Microsoft? Because they knew they would be releasing x86 gear that would be certified for Windows Server products and wanted to make sure the world knew that you didn't have to get your WinBoxes from Dell or HP anymore?
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
Actually the best way to buy a w2100z, if you don't need it -today- but do want it cheap, is to buy off of Ebay. They are regularly going for about 1/2 the retail price.
And AMD isn't subsidizing this at all, at least not actively. Sun just happens to be willing to sell for much lower than their traditional margins on these products to get back some of the workstation market. They have realized that workstations were a wedge into the hearts and minds of the admins who later (sometimes years later) made decisions on servers. And Sun has some very well priced Opteron servers now, too.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Can you name one feature (other than endianness or a few percent benchmark edge) that a user or even a C developer would notice that's different between an modern X86 CPU and any other modern CPU?
X86 is just an instruction bytecode format. The internals of today's X86 CPUs vary almost as much as the internals of CPUs with differring instruction sets.