Slashdot Mirror
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.
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).
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
I don't reply to Anonymous posts; if you have something to say to me, identify yourself or I won't reply.
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
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
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.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
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.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!