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.

Comments

This is a surprise

[Tim C]

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".

Re:This is a surprise

[be-fan]

If this was last year, he was likely talking about the older (P4-based) Xeon, not the new (Core 2-based) Xeon.

Re:So, ahhhh...

[TheThiefMaster]

No, they're using Intel chips in their line of servers that previously used AMD chips. For the pro-AMD slashdotters, this is "a very bad thing"(tm).

sun.com

[Daemonstar]

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

Sun is not abandoning AMD. Sun is adding Intel.

[gp310ad]

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...

Re:Sun needs this

[nwhitehorn]

Sun is moving ahead with their SPARC servers, and just taped out a successor to the Niagara. If you'd read the article, you'd know they are replacing their (quite excellent) AMD servers with Intel ones, not SPARC with anything. Sun has quite happily been selling both architectures for some time now.

Re:Sun needs this

[TheRaven64]

Depends on the workload. For floating point, the T1 is pretty dire (the T2 is better). The thing it does really well is highly concurrent workloads. AMD have a faster interconnect than Intel at the moment, but they are both crippled by one thing: the speed of light (painfully slow). The amount of work that a modern processor could do while waiting for a cache miss is enormous. Intel currently have some very clever logic predicting and pre-fetching cache misses, but they still suffer from them. Sun, however, cheat. Each core on a T1 has 4 contexts (8 on a T2), so when you get a cache miss it just switches over to the next thread instantly and carries on executing. The T1 core will only sit doing nothing if all four cores are in the middle of a cache miss, while an Intel or AMD CPU will do this for a few hundred cycles on every single cache miss.

For desktop workloads, this isn't such a great thing; most current-generation desktop applications do all their work in one thread, so if that thread has a cache miss you still end up doing a load of waiting because the other threads are not using the CPU much. On a server with a few hundred (or thousand) concurrent users, however, there are always threads waiting to do something, so you can get a phenomenal amount of throughput from this. With the growth in web applications, I expect Sun to do very well.