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Sun Joins Apple in the Intel Camp for x86 Chips
An anonymous reader writes "Don't worry, SPARC isn't being replaced by Itanic. However, Sun will start using Intel Xeon CPU's in their X86 servers. Further evidence that Intel's Core microarchitecture is winning back a lot of the business that AMD won with Opteron." More coverage at CNN Money and the International Herald Tribune.
Apples rot in the sun....
It seems like a well made match for Sun to use Itanium, if they still want to make servers and somehow remain different from Dell.
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sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
... that for anything other then a single CPU, the AMD architecture would be better for Sun to be using then Intel.
Core 2 Duo does seem to offer some benefits over the current opteron line and I think it is great that server vendors can so easily switch between them for new models. I believe Sun has a fairly sizable portion of the x86 server market and it was good to see a company have such success with AMD CPUs. Overall I think the competition is a good thing, but I do worry a bit that AMD will have trouble regaining sales even if they have the better next gen technology due to decreased profits as they lose server vendor sales. I look forward to a next gen battle based primarily on merit.
I was at JavaUk06 last year, and in his keynote speech (one of) the Marketing VPs spent quite a lot of time extolling the virtues of their new line of SunFire servers, paying particular attention to their power:performance ratio compared to similar Xeon-based servers. Listening to him then, you'd have thought that Opterons were the best thing since sliced bread. Yes, I realise that his job is to push their current and up-coming products and solutions, but the main thrust of his talk was "Opteron-powered SunFire servers use far less power than those crappy, power-hungry Xeon servers".
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Sun's using Intel chips in their servers that use Intel chips?
Zounds!
No story here, move along.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Sun has been in trouble for years, and this is a smart first step to getting out of it. Their chips are no longer the powerhouses they once were, and we're truly moving to a commodity chip market anyway. I hope this marks the beginning of Sun moving entirely to Intel/x86 based chips, this way Sun can focus on their other ailing businesses. Sun (just like Mac) is not big enough to keep up with AMD and Intel on chip performance, so why spend Millions/Billions trying?
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Of all the links posted in the summary, there's no link to the webcast on Sun's site about the story (01/22/07 @ 10:00 PST, Realplayer 10 required). :P
I don't reply to Anonymous posts; if you have something to say to me, identify yourself or I won't reply.
Which makes sense. When there are two competitive players whose product features and performance keep passing each other, why not give the customer a choice and at the same time exploit that competition to improve ones own position...
Do not look into LASER with remaining eye!
The Core 2 Duo has an awesome ALU, and it is definitely low power.
But they still suck for NUMA. Unless Sun is building desktops I don't see the point of the move until Intel starts rolling out CSI [which by that time AMD will be 65nm working on 45nm parts...].
For the desktop, hands down the Core 2 Duo is the winner. These things are just amazing. Even when overclocked the thing is so cold that the CPU fan turns off and the BIOS warns me (annoying... so I turned the warning off). In terms of IPC it matches the AMD offerings fairly well.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
That AMD will change the rate at which that "Number of dollars saved using AMD servers" billboard counts at?
One can only shove so much data across a single bus, and AMD seems to have realized this, while I don't see this as easily done from Intel.
One of the cool things about AMD is the Hypertransport bus. This allows one to offload various peripherals easily onto separate busses, while still allowing them to be shared across CPU's. Offloading PCI peripherals (for example) onto different busses allows one to achieve higher IO bandwidth. In contrast, Intel's current approach seems to be to shove more and more CPU's onto the same bus.
It's as if Intel has completely forgotten about how to keep the CPU busy - that's the main name of the game, and has been for years (to say the least). Idle CPUs are useless, and the more idle CPUs there are, the sillier it is, IMHO.
And AMD appears to be capable of outdoing Intel in the bandwidth area, for both memory and bus bandwidth.
So it looks to me like AMD will continue to be ahead of Intel as far as top-end server solutions go.
In short, I find this particular move puzzling. Sun has traditionally backed the best performance design, and I see Intel still lagging here overall. This strikes me as more of a marketing move, not a real engineering one. It will be interesting to see how popular these Intel-based servers remain.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
SPARCstation has been in trouble for years, and this is a smart first step to getting out of it. Their chips are no longer the powerhouses they once were, and we're truly moving to a commodity chip market anyway. I hope this marks the beginning of SPARCstation moving entirely to Pentium/x86 based chips, this way SPARCstation can focus on their other ailing businesses. SPARCstation (just like iPod) is not big enough to keep up with Opteron and Pentium on chip performance, so why spend Millions/Billions trying?
/snarky
In other words, a company's name is not interchangeable with its products' names.
What I'm seeing now are people who went google-style with blades buying empty rackspace to cope with hosting providers' power per rack ratio.
:) blades... IF you're within its application domain. Interesting gamble.
Meanwhile Sun's sales guys are selling $14k 72 watt, 8-way, 32-thread T2000's that can replace multiple Opteron (or Core
Most webapps probably are... not actually a lot of hot floating point, or math code in general, in that space. But you have to be very careful.
So, it's possible that Sun has turned their biggest disadvantage into their biggest advantage: they're in a niche! Yet they can design whole hardware architectures. So it frees them up to find ways to specialize, and it seems that there may be some payoffs there.
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I'd say the Niagra line of SPARC chips do quite well for server-oriented tasks.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Ironic that those are two of the most restrictive hardware+OS groups that partially get the switch to x86. One of them comes from a background of HCL games and license keys just to use some forms of hardware (*cough*E10k*cough)- the other seems to get a unwise idea to block interoperability yet look like another version of the same platform.
Unfortunately of the two, only Sun seems to get it right - Opensolaris is more about distribution (unless you have a Sparcstation, then it's about putting support behind an iron curtain), while OS X seems to be of exclusion(also the theme of many other things of Apple).
However, I'd trust neither of them with their known history to break compatibility in the manner each has done. Fine if you want to throw exotic standards in just to break compatibility with existing hardware, leave out hardware documentation to allow for deliberate incompatibility, or even require license keys just to use the *hardware* (not software, but the E10k keys case). Don't be surprised if people make up for the difference and run it on commodity hardware, or hardware that is just designed with some actual quality from the ground up.
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IAASE (I Am A Sun Employee), BTW.
Calling Itanium2 itanic in the same sentence as SPARC is a serious case of throwing stones in a glass house.
Comparing SPARC, through out time, to other RISC archs has never made SUN proud. HP's PA-Risc has been beating it constantly on performance.
The scalability of (atleast older) SPARC's was terrible, adding an extra 4 cpu's to a 12 cpu system wasn't 20% gain you'd hope for, it wasn't even 10.
Although Itanium is Intels Apollo-11, Itanium2 is not.
Check out www.spec.org and see for yourself. Out of the 'old unix gang', SPARC isn't in the game.
All generalizations are false
Apollo-11 being Apollo-13 (nt)
All generalizations are false
Suh-NAP!
Just before reading this, I happened to receive a Sun newsletter, with something about Xeon-fried chicken. Can't believe it's all reduced to this!
-Karthik
Intels market share getting bigger, and the near monopoly getting stronger.
What do we get in 10 years? Microsoft, Walmart, Intel and Mcdonalds are all that is left standing... one long grey blur for us 'consumers'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'd say the Niagra line of SPARC chips do quite well for server-oriented tasks.
"Server-oriented" is entirely too broad a category to recommend a single architecture. An OLTP server has different needs from a file server has different needs from a database server, etc, etc.
All different, relatively parallel types of hardware have their own properties that make them unique and interesting. I always thought it'd be cool to have an IBM PPC or Sun SPARC box, just to see if there was any difference in the processors and their capabilities. Seems like more companies (probably out of cheap-ness and brand-identification) are moving to Intel x86 procs, which is sad. At least companies like Nintendo and Sony are still showing some love for IBM processors.
1) ALOMs on SPARC use a service processor also... so that shouldn't be a big surprise.
2) Set your LOM to defer to BIOS, and your BIOS for serial port emulation, with an OS-mitigated handover (if that config option is there). Then set up your OSs to boot with a serial console. Attach all serial ports to a Cyclades or other terminal server. Enjoy the deliciousness.
3) Buy SATA in pairs and use (software!) RAID 1. It's cheap, fast and easy.
4) Consider using something BESIDES Solaris on x86. Maybe linux or freebsd? Especially on small n-way platforms where you don't need 32+ processors or zones...
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..with hyperthreading. Switch context when you get a stall, keep going. Of course HT processors didn't have dedicated execution units for each context, and a quirk of the P4 architecture would keep that stalled thread occupying those shared units, preventing the "current" thread from proceeding. End result: people turned it off because it sometimes hurt multi-threaded performance. It was a mistake to introduce it in a half-assed implementation.
Intel wisely abandoned it and dedicated more chip area to cache, prefetch, and the like. A re-visit of that technology with more duplicated execution paths might be wise on a dual core server chip... quad core on a lower power budget.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON