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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.
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.
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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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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
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Wasn't Core architecture found eating about as much as AMD, considering that AMD CPUs include memory controller, and Intel has it on the Northbridge?
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).
Not really, it makes AMD chips cheaper. Who cares if Intel has a 10% performance edge for an extra 30 watts? Me, I will stay with the more efficient and cost effective AMD. Especially since my P4 with a Intel PERL mobo died early.
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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Opteron does have an advantage to some degree in 4S and above systems, but even that is minimal and can certainly be worked around. So your final sentence is simply wrong. Intel chips are the best performing design in many different situations, including some of the high end machines Sun sells. Also, don't forget they're not stopping AMD sales - where the Opteron still makes sense they will still use it.
I really, really don't get where this "Sun is dying" thing is coming from. Having a bunch of friends at IBM and several telcos and consulting businesses, it is simply amazing the number of Sun Fire 25K machines being bought everywhere. These are 72-processor monsters that will set you back a cool $2 million each, and they're in pretty hot demand.
In the market for very large servers, there's only three choices: HP SuperDomes, IBM p590s and p595, and SunFire 25ks. The Sun machines have by far the largest market share, and with the support contracts they are making a pretty penny with each.
IAASE (I Am A Sun Employee), BTW.
I agree with you. The thing is, even if RightSaidFred99 over there thinks Intel is just as good at SMP configurations, it's only NOW just starting to become a reality. AMD has been using HyperTransport since the first Opteron, released several years ago. You've been able to use 4-way Opteron boxes and achieve MUCH better overall system performance then you ever could with a Xeon. Think VMware. When a dual-CPU Xeon outperforms a Quad-CPU Xeon, there's something wrong with the bus architecture.
The "core" CPU is finally, after over 7 years, perhaps better then the current generation of AMD CPU's, but again, it's still based on the same old North-bridge configuration. While Intel has managed to bump up the speed on this bus a bit, and they can more easily support new and faster RAM because the CPU doesn't have the memory controller, it's still the same old. If you're doing 4-way or more, with heavy applications like busy ESX servers, you're going to get a LOT more performance out of your Opteron system, including 4-way systems utilizing multi-core CPU's. Just because CPU's are going dual and multi-core, doesn't mean enterprise servers will ship with only one socket.
I say Good for Intel, the Core CPU is a good one. But, if you look at everything Intel has been doing with their CPU line lately, you'll see that they are generally copying AMD in a lot of places, starting with EM64T (aka AMD64.)
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- Management asks the materials guys roughly how many transistors they think they are going to be able to put on a die in five years.
- Management asks the market research people what factors the chip-buying public is going to find important in five years (e.g. raw throughput, multithreading performance, power usage).
- Management tells a team of a few hundred engineers to develop a chip that is strong in x, y and z and fits in n transistors.
- The engineers try a load of things and come up with a design (much of their time is spent debugging).
- If the materials guys were in the right ballpark with their transistor number, they begin producing it (this is about five years after step one).
- If the marketing people were right in their guesses then they sell a load of chips, bringing us to the obligatory...
- Profit!!!
This series of steps requires hundreds of millions of dollars investment along the way. If you guess wrongly at step two, you end up with something like NetBurst at the end, when it turns out the market wants something like the Opteron.I am TheRaven on Soylent News
``if they still want to make servers and somehow remain different from Dell.''
Ye gods no! There's a world of difference between Sun and Dell. With Dell, you think you're buying a PC, but you're not; you're buying a computer with the quality of a PC, but without the flexibility and compatibility (missing drive cradles, anyone?). With Sun, you think you're buying a Real Computer, and you are. Ever have a component break within warranty? Dell will happily send you a replacement part, but if it breaks every month, meaning it's obviously not up to the task, they'll just shrug it off and say "well, it wasn't designed for that". I've never heard that about Sun.
Last but not least, Sun gives a lot to the world in the form of open source software and standards, whereas Dell looks like they'd rather these these things didn't exist.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
You should check the numbers, most of the losses stem from the fact, that their stocks have gone down from insance values into normal numbers, especially the billions of losses in 2001 and 2002, if you count out the stock devaluation, Sun has done very solidly, with many years of earnings and a few lof losses (mainly caused due tu buying other companies) The sun is dying rumor is caused mainly due to people seeing big reds but not knowing the exact numbers and those losses mainly are paper losses while suns bank account grows and grows. Sun is a very solid company, not a big performer in the eyes of the robber barons (aka stock brokers), but definitely also definitely not a second SGI.