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.

This is a surprise

[Tim C]

I was at JavaUk06 last year, and in his keynote speech (one of) the Marketing VPs spent quite a lot of time extolling the virtues of their new line of SunFire servers, paying particular attention to their power:performance ratio compared to similar Xeon-based servers. Listening to him then, you'd have thought that Opterons were the best thing since sliced bread. Yes, I realise that his job is to push their current and up-coming products and solutions, but the main thrust of his talk was "Opteron-powered SunFire servers use far less power than those crappy, power-hungry Xeon servers".

Re:This is a surprise

[be-fan]

If this was last year, he was likely talking about the older (P4-based) Xeon, not the new (Core 2-based) Xeon.

Re:This is a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

"you'd have thought that Opterons were the best thing since sliced bread."

In fact it was at the time when it was competing against Xeon's based on the P4 core. Things have changed since the new Core2 based Xeon's have come on the market.

Re:This is a surprise

[DemoLiter3]

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?

But the interesting bit is

[$RANDOMLUSER]

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

What's that about??

Re:So, ahhhh...

[TheThiefMaster]

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).

Sun needs this

[Salvance]

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?

Re:Sun needs this

[nwhitehorn]

Sun is moving ahead with their SPARC servers, and just taped out a successor to the Niagara. If you'd read the article, you'd know they are replacing their (quite excellent) AMD servers with Intel ones, not SPARC with anything. Sun has quite happily been selling both architectures for some time now.

Re:Sun needs this

[InsaneGeek]

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)

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...

Re:Sun needs this

[TheRaven64]

Depends on the workload. For floating point, the T1 is pretty dire (the T2 is better). The thing it does really well is highly concurrent workloads. AMD have a faster interconnect than Intel at the moment, but they are both crippled by one thing: the speed of light (painfully slow). The amount of work that a modern processor could do while waiting for a cache miss is enormous. Intel currently have some very clever logic predicting and pre-fetching cache misses, but they still suffer from them. Sun, however, cheat. Each core on a T1 has 4 contexts (8 on a T2), so when you get a cache miss it just switches over to the next thread instantly and carries on executing. The T1 core will only sit doing nothing if all four cores are in the middle of a cache miss, while an Intel or AMD CPU will do this for a few hundred cycles on every single cache miss.

For desktop workloads, this isn't such a great thing; most current-generation desktop applications do all their work in one thread, so if that thread has a cache miss you still end up doing a load of waiting because the other threads are not using the CPU much. On a server with a few hundred (or thousand) concurrent users, however, there are always threads waiting to do something, so you can get a phenomenal amount of throughput from this. With the growth in web applications, I expect Sun to do very well.

Re:Sun needs this

[MemoryDragon]

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.

sun.com

[Daemonstar]

Of all the links posted in the summary, there's no link to the webcast on Sun's site about the story (01/22/07 @ 10:00 PST, Realplayer 10 required). :P

Sun is not abandoning AMD. Sun is adding Intel.

[gp310ad]

Which makes sense. When there are two competitive players whose product features and performance keep passing each other, why not give the customer a choice and at the same time exploit that competition to improve ones own position...

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.

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

[RightSaidFred99]

Your premise is flawed. First, Intel has and will have dual FSB solutions coming down the pipe. Second, they will have a much better interconnect, in CSI, in the 2008 timeframe. Third - your assumption that "IO bandwidth" is the main factor in performance has been proved false. The Intel chips are winning the majority of benchmarks, and that includes dual-CPU, 8-core systems. It turns out that the "sky is falling!" mentality about the Intel FSB has been proved to be partly nonsense, and partly premature.

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.

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.)

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:I'm sceptical

[TheRaven64]

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.) Copying from AMD? Not really. Intel had dual-core before AMD (although you could say they copied this from IBM). They had SMT (HyperThreading) before AMD, although seem to have abandoned it in their recent chips (again, IBM had this first too). x86-64 extensions? Sure, but they are some minor tweaks to the ISA. SSE4 is a similar sized change, and they didn't copy this from AMD (although AMD are now implementing SSE in their chips...). What about dynamic shared caches? Nope, Intel got this one before AMD too (IBM, though, had it before either). 65nm process technology? Nope, Intel are transitioning away from this just as AMD are moving to it.

The only place AMD are really ahead at the moment is in processor interconnect, and in most situations interconnect throughput is not a bottleneck for Intel (latency, on the other hand, is a big problem for everyone, although Intel have better pre-caching technology than AMD at the moment, making it less of a problem for them). Oh, AMD also have a slight advantage in virtualisation (their extensions are a bit better than Intel's), but they are both so far behind the likes of IBM and Sun in this area that it's not even funny.

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.

Re:Mac?

[Bastian]

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?

In other words, a company's name is not interchangeable with its products' names.
 
/snarky

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:Oh Gosh! Sun 386 all over again?

[Anonymous Coward]

The "Sun is dying" meme stems mostly from the fact they haven't posted a profit in the better part of a decade

Re:So, ahhhh...

[teg]

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.

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.

Oh no you di-in't!

[JeanPaulBob]

Suh-NAP!

Re:So, ahhhh...

[TheRaven64]

Yes, that's 'all' AMD has to do. If you think that's simple, here's a quick overview of how a CPU is developed:

1. 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.
2. 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).
3. 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.
4. The engineers try a load of things and come up with a design (much of their time is spent debugging).
5. 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).
6. If the marketing people were right in their guesses then they sell a load of chips, bringing us to the obligatory...
7. 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.

Re:Oh Gosh! Sun 386 all over again?

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

My condolences. I've managed Solaris systems for years, almost entirely SPARCs, but the new place I'm working for buys the cheap x86 junk. Now the x86 systems that Sun ships aren't bad despite some issues with the nVidia RAID chip, Intel Gigabit ethernet nics and the damn x86 BIOS, but running it on a generic 1U x86 server is a joke compared to SPARC. You've got no lights out management support (fortunately some of Sun's AMD systems come with a dedicated service processor for this task, but it requires additional setup), the system boards typically support SATA disks and not SAS or SCSI, which in my experience are much more reliable and provide better feedback to the operator when they're starting to fail, and Solaris 10 currently has a major reliability problem on the x86 architecture.

If one of your Solaris 10, x86 systems goes down improperly, it's most likely _not_ going to come up without human intervention. I still don't understand the whole process, but the second stage boot loader reads a boot archive into memory; if there have been changes made to the root filesystem since the archive was last updated, the system will not boot. You'll have to fsck the disks manually, then clear the system/boot-archive service, then update it with "bootadm update-archive" and reboot. WTF? One simply cannot count on the x86 systems to come back up.

Give me a good 'ol SPARC based system with a boot ROM anyday; the x86 architecture is just plain fscked.

Re:Worry?

[RAMMS EIN]

``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.

Re:Oh Gosh! Sun 386 all over again?

[MemoryDragon]

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.