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Sun Unveils 64-bit Server Line

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the long-overdue dept.

SumDog is one of many to let us know, PC World is reporting that Sun is expected to reveal the first few of their new 64-bit servers at their quarterly product rollout. From the article: "Formerly code-named Galaxy, the Sun Fire X2100, X4100, and X4200 servers represent the company's bid to woo customers, particularly the financial industry sector, away from rival server vendors Hewlett-Packard and Dell."

4 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Spells Death for the SPARC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The new Sun servers run on Opteron, an implementation of x86-64. These servers spell D.E.A.T.H. for the SPARC implementations.

    The marketing talking head will claim that SPARC lives in Niagara and Rock, but note that Intel is now building a new x86-64 implementation that focuses on multicores just like Niagara and Rock. Given a choice between Niagara/Rock and Intel's/AMD's new multicore chips, most customers will prefer the latter.

    The only future remaining for the SPARC is in esoteric highend systems built by Fujitsu and destined for simulating weather, nuclear explosions, and overpopulation.

    1. Re:Spells Death for the SPARC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      These new Galaxy servers; x4100 & x4200 (x2100 was code named Aquarius and isn't an identical design to the Galaxy architecture) are mainly aimed at grids, we can put 32 of these dual socket, dual core servers into one rack and have a 128-way grid.

      When the Niagara based servers are released we'll have a 1 socket, 8 core, 4 threads per core server which in a 32 server rack gives us a 1024-way grid in one rack ...

      Now, the Niagara CPUs performance (specifically floating point performance) is lower than Opteron (Sun have made no secret of that) but for heavily threaded/moderate computation workloads, a grid of Niagara CPUs looks like a very interesting proposition.

      Rock is rumoured to be SMP capable so rather than building grids of these boxes running seperate OS instances you are able to build 1024-way (maybe more) SMP servers with significantly less power consumption and much higher performance/watt and performance/$ than existing SMP (from ANY company) in a footprint that is a fraction of the size of current highend servers and mainframes.

      I wouldn't say SPARC is dead yet, it might have been a bit ill for a while there, but it's on it's way back.

  2. Review over at Anandtech by Rufus211 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Anandtech has a quick review of the X2100 up. Fairly standard, but well designed server it looks like. The big news is the entry level one for only $745. True it doesn't come with a HD, but that's still a hell of a deal for a true server (not a dell desktop box lets call it a server).

  3. How about 64 bit java? by wheelbarrow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does this mean that Sun will get serious about supporting a good 64 bit java for these systems? Java systems application design could change radically if somebody can provide a 64 bit JVM that can process efficient garbage collection across very large java heap spaces.