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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.
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.
The news here isn't that they're using x86 architecture. It's that they're using Intel chips. They already have AMD Opterons for sale, and they're adding Xeons. And Solaris 10 does run on x86. Some see it as a concession that their server CPU designs are little more than a niche market. That diagnosis is probably correct, and if Sun wants to ever dig themselves out of the "Sun is dying" meme, they'll have to start taking advantage of the fact that their competitors are engaged in a price war, one that's also cutting into profits. Sun can still pride themselves on quality server hardware, support contracts and integration, even if they aren't the designer behind most their chips.
Meanwhile, their Niagra still has some niche applications, and will grow as software is designed for dual and quad core chips. If Niagra does what they say it will, people will be forced to consider one Niagra unit versus 6 Xeon servers. Xeons may have fallen in price recently, but they're still not cheap, so that's a calculus that Sun might win some day.
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Open Source Sysadmin
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.
The "Sun is dying" meme stems mostly from the fact they haven't posted a profit in the better part of a decade
It's not "more performance for more power" - currently, it is "more performance, less power". At the system level, so effects of built in memory controller has been counted.
Intel currently has better performance per core, more cores per socket and less power per core than AMD - AMD has done pretty much one thing in many years: Dual core. Time to get off the laurels from that time and improve their chips again.
but for a real work in a server, it's the most energy efficient, powerful architecture available.
I tend to disagree with that statement, for traditional java, oracle, web serving, etc server loads the Intel/AMD processor has consistently had better performance and with our Opterons is much more power efficient as well. We have found that on those operations the Intel/AMD processors have traditionally outperformed the Sparc proc by 2 to 3 times. The benefit that sparc traditionally have given you is bus speeds, being able to read in lots of data from disk, network, etc. that has diminoushed over the past years, really only leaving reliability as their main non-niche benefit. From a general computing system perspective in my experience the Intel/AMD is more powerful, more energy efficient, and much more cost effective.
As an example have found that for Oracle a single HPDL585 8corex32gb (4 socket) has 3x the performance of a Sun v1280 8x32gb, requiring 2x fewer Oracle licenses (only 75% per core so 6 rather than 8 for the SPAC), resulting in a significantly higher RTI (the 585 is about 2.5x less expensive than the v1280)
Sorry to say that but Sun not really has been in trouble, especially not nowadays, with a good product lineup, most of their losses basically were stock devaluations which do not resembly anything regarding Suns profitability, from 2000 on if you count out the stock devaluations Sun hat a rather solid earning with only a handful of quarters of losses (some of them caused by buying new companies), not a huge performer, but it is defintely not in trouble and its bank account has definitely more cash than in 2000 at the height of the dot bomb craze.