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

I'm sceptical

[btarval]

I agree that competition is good for the consumer, but I have to wonder what the effect will really be on their AMD servers. In the server biz, there's a LOT more to it than today's CPU-intensive benchmarks. The other big thing is IO bandwidth, and this is where AMD has been far more competitive than Intel is. AMD appears to be able to continue this lead, based on both companies claimed roadmaps, the last time I looked.

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.

Re:I'm sceptical

[afidel]

Glad you bought into the desktop class benchmarks that all the little internet sites like to publish. Meanwhile I'm happily using Opteron servers for serious N-Tier architecture where their performance per watt and lack of I/O bottlenecks is great. I also use some Intel Core based Xeon's for less demanding workloads where they prove to a good match of price/performance and power use per workload. I guess I actually research stuff, test it in my specific situation, and select the best product, unlike the many hacks in IT =)

Re:Oh Gosh! Sun 386 all over again?

[xenocide2]

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.