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Sun Cancels UltraSPARC IIIi+
Doctor Memory writes "El Reg is reporting that Sun has finally come clean and admitted that they have killed the UltraSPARC IIIi+ chip. According to John Fowler, Sun's server chief, 'We canceled it last fiscal year to focus on the ramp (up) of UltraSPARC IV+, Niagara and Niagara 2.' Sun has had great success with its new Niagara line, and with it's line of AMD-based systems."
I think that Sun UltraSPARC IV can replace UltraSPARC III smoothly (they share the same socket, Sun can provide help doing this, c...) According to: http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-IV/index. xml
"Executing on Sun's Throughput Computing strategy, the dual-thread UltraSPARC IV processor marks the first milestone in Sun's Chip Multithreading (CMT) roadmap (...) It protects customers' investments through 100 percent application binary compatibility, and can provide an upgrade path for current UltraSPARC III processor-based systems "
It's like replacing an Athlon Socket AM2 Single Core with a Dual Core (I think...)
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return NOBODY;
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Spammers having been letting me know about Niagara for years
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
You can't delay something that was cancelled. Sun was just delaying the expectation for people clamoring for the new UltraSparc IV. I can't wait to get my hands on some at work. We could consolidate some of our Java servers together in our testing environments at a lower cost than buying more of the BIG IRON systems. I'll be curious to see what systems they're going to wrap around these processors. Are the current lines going to get faster CPUs? Are they going to create whole new lines of Servers?
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
"And thought, damn, nobody's going to buy that, people aren't stupid. Everyone knows that IIIi+ is almost 4, it has to be 3.8 at least so we just decided to rename it 4. Sorry... IV... IV+... Would another plus be overkill do you think?" said a Sun spokesman.
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It's here: http://malfy.org/
Except the smallest USIV box they make is the 490, 4RU and non-hs power supplies. Get me a 240 replacement with a USIV and I'll be all over it. Or better yet figure out how to add HS dual power and the USIV to the 210.
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Is anyone surprised? USIV and T1 are by far Suns big cash cows. While I'm typing this at an USIIIi powered workstation, and would love a simple upgrade, I cant say that this upsets me in the least. I'd far rather Sun's R&D go into thier higher-end stuff than entry-level stuff, since it will push the current "high end" crap down to the level that us mere mortals will be able to get it! :-D
I hope niagara and UltraSparc IV to have prices cut with this move.
I guess we know what the "i" stands for in UltraSpark IIIi. It's for imaginary. Like in math.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I used to think the same thing - but you have to check thier pricing of the last few years - its quite competitive straight up. Factor in other costs, its a bargain. www.tallsails.com
"Its" is possessive. I know it's no big deal but I just couldn't resist reminding everyone that virtually every story posted here is written sloppily and goes entirely unedited these days. =/
Run Windows on an AMD based SUN box and I bet Hell has frozen over! At least that is what I would have thought 10 years ago!
I'm afraid you're right (and I'm wrong).
According to
http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v240/specs.xml
or
http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v210/specs.xml
There are no processor upgrades avalaible to the Sun V240 or Sun V210 Server. I suppose that the upgrade is only avalaible to the Big Iron Systems.
The V490 is 5U, not 4.
uh, the V490 does have hotswap power supplies. As a matter of fact, all servers that sun makes that have dual power supplies are hotswappable.
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Well, thats not true, and this news is quite astonishing, _especially_ since they now say that they cancelled long ago without tellingit!? The US IV cannot be seated in the smaller boxes below 5U.
Lots of customers are going to be pissed.
You are refering to a different family of processors.
The UltraSPARC III/IV/IV+ use the Gigaplane Interconnect which is designed to support >4 Modules, the UltraSPARC IIIi uses JBus which is designed to support 4 CPU's. The two are not compatible so you cannot drop a US IV+ into a IIIi slot.
In August of 2004, I was in Sillicon Valley, and I visited the Sun headquarters.
It was quite possibly the most disorganized, un-coordinated place on earth. If Disney World was run by a single quadrapalegic, I think it would still be more effecient.
We took a tour, and the guide honestly said that the only really interesting thing they had going on, was that they could bring their dogs to work....uh thanks man. really technologically advanced
*double the pleasure, double the fun*
Sun has done some questionable things, but those aren't it.
Their handling of sun4m and hardware thereof in not-so OpenSolaris 10 seems to be a bit (more?) questionable given that there was a workable, buildable version of it- and I doubt svn goes back 3-4+ years to s10_22. It'd at least be better to have them put it back in, along with all the hardware eol'ed along the way(and fully documented). Then Sun can just close the book on that platform for good once there is something of a "reference build" that works as well as the rest (versus something that was crippled out of spite - dtrace is forgiven here, and I'd think you could dig up s10_22, and enough of else was dropped to get about any sun4m class system running, bmc).
Anything much earlier than sun4c/d/m seems to not have much of an installbase, or mass amounts of documentation missing on critical points of hardware(console, network, storage). Ironic that for now that Sun *doesnt* want you to have your hardware and software match, even when there is a perfect opportunity to do it.
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And the V490 has some kind of fruity European 208V power supplies, which only the V890 seems to share. Gaaah!
USIV is the replacement for the USIII, upgrading an USIII system is as easy as calling Sun and getting them to swap in the USIVs (very similar to replacing a single core athlon with a same-socket dual core athlon, except the motherboards get swapped out, not just the processors)
Unfortunately, the article is talking about the USIIIi+ being cancelled, which was the upgrade for the USIIIi
In the server space, Niagara based systems are the replacement for the USIIIi, but there is not really a replacement on the workstation side (they could always try to wring more speed out of the USIIIi, or go in with some kind of opteron solution)
Not quite, the V210 and X2100, the X2200 and the T1000 do not have dual hot swapable PSU's.
They are all 1U boxes and most 1U boxes don't have dual hot pluggable PSU's.
208V implies that it is a 3 phase power connection, not that it is a european power supply.
3 phase power allows for more efficient distribution, and is very common for high power devices (large sun boxes can pull >5kW)
"European" was a joke, son, the implication being that a plug with two blades that actually lie on the same line (instead of being parallel) to each other is so different from typical American non-DC data center wiring that it may as well have come from a place with other funny electical wiring, like, say, Britain.
:7) Our electrician, however, thought it was a good one, and since he was such a big help, I'm re-running the joke for his enjoyment.
Clearly, this isn't as funny when explained as why delivered as a throw-away line.
but I don't want to have a noisey rackmount system. I think it would be interesting if Sun made an inexpensive "developer's kit" for the UltraSparc T1. Like Mac Mini form factor (or mini tower), and under $1500. Actually they could just make it an ATX motherboard and let the developer figure out power supply, case, ram, etc. As much as I adore Sun's cases, they are probably very expensive to produce.
Tempted to just get a SunFire T1000 for $3500 anyways just to experiment on. It's a pretty good price for a system with 6-8 cores. And the whole threading thing would have characteristics worth experimenting with. Like how to tune your algorithms for these multiprocessor, multithreaded systems.
I'd like to think any ground you gain by improving your algorithms on an UltraSparc T1 would translate to other future multicore systems. Since the goal here is to keep the scheduler full of things to do, and reduce contention in your algorithm.
maybe it's a pipe dream and Sun won't be giving us an affordable devkit.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I'm under NDA so I'm posting as AC, but apart from the T1000/T2000 (which are nice) there are 3 new boxes about to be announced to modernise the low end range. I've deleted the presentation, but from memory US IV+ CPUs and modern busses are the main benefits. I think they were talking about a 15-30% performance improvement.
Expect the model number to be incremented by 5.
The UltraSPARC IIIi (not III) uses a different socket and different interconnection bus. It is JBus on the IIIi, and something else (don't remember, or never knew) on the III and IV. The IIIi an III are not socket compatible. That said, Sun should be able to make a motherboard with IV chips fit in the IIIi enclosures if ther eis a market for it. I doubt there is. The Niagara and AMD boxes pretty much have the volume servr market covered between them, and Dual Niagara II boxes will quite likely outperform the fastest current IIIi boxes in every way. Concentrating on Niagara II and Opteron makes a lot more sense than trying to squeeze and extra 400MHz out of the IIIi.
I just read through your thread on osol-discuss (read it here). I think Casper's and Bryan's replies to you explain everything. I am not quite sure what your beef is. Just because OpenSolaris does not compile on sun4m anymore? Most of the Solaris 10/OpenSolaris features do not support sun4m. Of course, if you want to, you can always contribute code to the project to enable sun4m support. Good luck with that.
Their handling of sun4m and hardware thereof in not-so OpenSolaris 10 seems to be a bit (more?) questionable given that there was a workable, buildable version of it- and I doubt svn goes back 3-4+ years to s10_22. It'd at least be better to have them put it back in, along with all the hardware eol'ed along the way(and fully documented).
Nonsense. Solaris 10 is too big for sun4m machines. Run NetBSD or Linux insted. Let it lie. Solaris 10 is the future. sun4m is the (distant) past.
Stick Men
Who is, or what is, this Sun? :-)
OK, I just read the thread, and my only remaining question is: was support for line breaks in text messages introduced after sun4m?
I seem to recall McNealy talking about this before he stepped down. I don't know of anyone who expected the IIIi to get anything more than maybe a speed bump, and even that was questionable. This is utterly not news.
Oh but wait--it's The Register. Any product that gets cancelled is worth talking about, if you can spin it as a death knell for the company du jour.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Really. I want to know. I've wondered that for years, and now with Sun's outlook kinda shakey, why do they still do it? Kill the SPARC, and just go with something from Intel or AMD? What advantage does the SPARC have that the offerings from the Intel and AMD don't?
Whhops, sorry about that, I had just been looking at the ass-end of a 490 and noted the PS's didn't have a release on the rear, but now looking through sunsolve I see the the ac inputs are fixed, but the guts of the PS's are HS. My bad
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El Reg already covered the +5 boxes, they were supposedly using the USIIIi+, but maybe sun has woke up.
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Danke, been a long night, but my point still stands, they aren't very dense boxes.
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Only in the mid to high end boxes. the 6800 and up (except the 10k and 12k) can mix and match USIII and USIV uniboards but we're talking about under 12 RU chasis.
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Well the V210 doesn't have dual power supplies, so you are in direct agreement with the post you replied to, which said: "As a matter of fact, all servers that sun makes that have dual power supplies are hotswappable."