Slashdot Mirror
Sun to Give Niagara Servers to Reviewers
abdulzis writes "Sun Micro's Jonathan Schwartz says that Sun is giving away free servers to bloggers who do a good job reviewing their servers. From the blog article: 'if you write a blog that fairly assesses the machine's performance (positively or negatively), send us a pointer, we're likely to let you keep the machine'" Mr. Schwartz, if you're reading this, feel free to send us one with "Attn: CowboyNeal" on the label.
What we have here is an eight core CPU, running four threads on a single core. Total power consumption at peak? 80 watts. (CPU only, of course; the system itself will need more -- 220 to 400 watts, depending on the specs.) Clock speed is "only" 1 GHz or so. One floating point unit on the entire chip.
So for scientific work, or other stuff that's seriously hammering the FPU, it's going to be a dog. Sun has never denied this. You're not going to take weather simulations and throw them on this thing; it'd be a waste of money. But for other applications -- database; web server; maybe financial simulations -- there's a hell of a lot of grunt, for very little power consumption.
Sun has effectively opened up a new niche. Anything you have written for Sparc before will still run on this thing, but if you can manage to get a good degree of parallelism in your workload, it will positively fly.
In my opinion (not having seen one of these in action), it's going to be either a massive flop, or a massive win for Sun. My money's on a massive win. They've thought long and hard about common workloads, and have come up with a CPU optimised for those workloads, without too much overhead from making a "general purpose" CPU that can handle anything you throw at it reasonably well. I can't help but wonder how long it will be before we see similar designs out of IBM and Intel.
The other question I have is: what's the IO on these systems like? Poor IO would cripple it, but again, it depends on your workload. The T1000 has a single expansion slot (PCI-E), but four gigabit ethernet ports; the T2000 has three PCI-E and two PCI-X with four gigabit ethernet. On paper, it looks good; time will tell, though, if the systems live up to the expectations.