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

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

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.