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

Competition benefit / AMD warchest

[cblack]

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.

But the interesting bit is

[$RANDOMLUSER]

...and for Intel to endorse Sun's Solaris operating system...

What's that about??

Questionable

[tomstdenis]

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

Re:Questionable

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD reached 65nm last quarter. Intel's already moved to 45nm, though, but AMD's trying to catch up. Still, one of Intel's big strengths is its silicon fabbing capability; some have said Intel isn't so much in the business of designing chips as building fabs.

Yeah, I think you're right

[Concern]

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.

Meanwhile Sun's sales guys are selling $14k 72 watt, 8-way, 32-thread T2000's that can replace multiple Opteron (or Core :) blades... IF you're within its application domain. Interesting gamble.

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.

Re:Oh Gosh! Sun 386 all over again?

[Daishiman]

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.

Re:Sun needs this

[BrainInAJar]

"Today you can get the same functionality with several cheap Intel boxes with either Windows or Linux."

Or UNIX for that matter. Solaris is free to use, and a support contract is about half the price of RHEL...

Sun Benefits

[dupup]

FWIW, it seems to me that Sun agreed to launch a Xeon-based server line in exchange for Intel pushing Solaris x86, rather than the other way 'round. In other words, the emphasis, from Sun's point of view, is that Intel will advocate in favor of Solaris, for which Sun offers Intel some bidness.

IAASE (I Am A Sun Employee), BTW.

Re:I'm sceptical

[cbreaker]

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.)