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Sun Considers Opteron
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Apr 10, 2003 02:30 PM
from the workstations-on-the-cheap(er) dept.
from the workstations-on-the-cheap(er) dept.
Sanjay writes "Official from Sun spokesman. Sun is considering using AMD's Opteron chip in a server it expects to deliver to the market shortly.
Intead of fighting Win of Wintel (like Redhat is doing), Sun can choose to fight both with Linux AMD's servers and also fight with HP/IBM as Itanium is anyway a non starter.
Sun can rise again!
"
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Creepy (Score:1)
(http://www.wryday.com/)
The Sun is Setting (Score:5, Informative)
The problem for Sun is that Linux on Opteron does not give Sun much in the way of profits because the profit margin is low and competition is fierce. Sun cannot compete against IBM and HP in this area. Worse, Sun has no services organization to make any money by helping its customers to use Linux on Opteron.
Anyhow remember that stupid comment by Scott McNealy, who claimed that Sun is a one system -- one OS and one processor -- company. Now, Sun is distributing 2 OSes and 2 processors. Read the article at the Economist web site [economist.com]. It says that Sun will lose out big time in the Linux marketplace.
The Sun is setting. Good Riddance.
Re:The Sun is Setting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Sun is Setting (Score:5, Informative)
I looked this into this topic a while ago out of curiousity. X86's are actually descendants of the Intel 8008 microcontroller, not the 4004. Today's x86 chips are still assembly-source compatible with the 8008 (not binary compatible; there were automatic tools available to convert 8008 source to 8080 source, for example).
Even though the 4004 was the first microprocessor on the market, the 8008 design was started at Intel prior to the 4004. However, that project was put on the back burner before the 4004 was developed. After the 4004 design was finished, work resumed on the 8008. The 8-bit 8008 and 4-bit 4004 CPUs were not source or binary compatible with each other. (Here [antiquetech.com] is some more info.)
Re:The Sun is Setting (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.lp.org/)
SPECint-for-SPECint, UltraSPARC has lagged in single-CPU performance for several years, now. This is not news to anyone. However, Sun clearly out-classes x86 in SMP. Sun actually competes very well on the throughput-based benchmarks. If you look slightly past the SPECint2000, you'll see the SPECrate benchmarks and things like TPC. Sun regulary makes press releases about world records for throughput (leap-frogging with people like IBM, HP, and SGI, etc.). Even in small SMP configs with 2 CPUs, 1GHz UltraSPARCs will easily match Pentium 4 of well over twice the clock for floating-point throughput. Throughput is more important for large simulations and other big tasks.
Don't forget that the Pentium 4, for example, focuses on marketing buzz. Theoretical benchmark this, theoretical bandwidth that, etc. without divulging the inherent limitation in the PC architecture (one AGP slot, non-linear SMP scaling, memory limit hacks, high power consumption, you name it).
Re:The Sun is Setting (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.cpeterso.com/)
I'm currently reading Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma". His hypothesis perfectly describes Sun's predicament. Successful established companies will pursue higher end, higher margin markets and ignore smaller markets that have smaller margins and more competition. Eventually, an underpowered underdog (say, Linux) captures the smaller markets. Through gradual improvements, the underdog is eventually powerful enough to meet the requirements of the established company's customers. The established company is then left holding nothing. This pattern of "lousy but cheap (or smaller)" eventually beating "good but expensive" can be seen in many industries.
CNET covers the story too (Score:2, Informative)
(http://www.anotherbear.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday November 25 2003, @03:29PM)
and Slashdot has covered CNET's story [slashdot.org]
Dupe, I think. (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.dasnet.org/)
Whatever happened to those of us with acess to TMF being able to submit notice for pending dupes? I tried, but there's no easy way to figure out how to send a note to the editors. I still like the idea (naturally, since I brought it up) of a little form on TMF stories with the ability to submit dupe notification right then and there.
Of course, if I'm wrong, then, fine.
Re:Dupe, I think. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Dupe, I think. (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.daishar.com/blog)
Which sounds like the perfect definition for a Slashback story. We don't need another full-blown story on this just because Sun confirmed it. All we need is a paragraph in Slashback saying, "By the way, remember this story about Sun and the Opteron? Sun's confirmed it."
following suit (Score:1)
(http://thewindsurfer.com/)
Re:following suit (Score:5, Funny)
April 9: Microsoft commits to Opteron [slashdot.org]
April 10: Sun considers Opteron [slashdot.org]
Who's following who ?
wow, good news for AMD (Score:1)
dupe (Score:1)
(http://www.danhendricks.com/)
April fools is only on the FIRST day of April, guys, not all month.
Heh (Score:2, Funny)
(http://www.grub.net/blog/index.html | Last Journal: Wednesday June 27, @08:48AM)
When I read "Sun can rise again" my wee mind read it as if Apu was saying it ala "Thank you, come again"
if it's April Fool's day again, shoot me (Score:2, Funny)
Or is this a normal Taco dupe? [slashdot.org]
/. Considers Searching (Score:2)
"Sun can rise again!" (Score:2)
America, Land of the rising Sun?
The Sun will come up, tomorrow!
Dupe Dupe Dupe... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
News for the amnesiac. Stuff that mattered
Re:Dupe Dupe Dupe... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
"News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. News for Nerds again. Stuff that mattered."
Intel (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.slashdot.org/~ralico/ | Last Journal: Friday August 15 2003, @08:58AM)
So when is Intel going to use Opteron?
difference from a PC (Score:2)
(http://www.di.ens.fr/~monniaux)
Perhaps the service.
Or laboratory used to buy Sun workstations and servers. We liked their service contracts. But still.. their hardware is SO expensive! We now buy PCs from Dell!
Re:difference from a PC (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.howtobeinvisible.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 04, @07:42AM)
Ever hot swap a CPU on a SMP PC? How about adding a CPU or RAM module without powering down? Hot sawp PCI? How about 4-way machines scalable to 64-way? 64+ Gb of RAM? Terabytes of storage?
PCs are only starting to be able to compete in that market, which is why Sun, IBM, and HP still sell those types of machines.
If you don't need those types of options, then PCs are fine.
Re:difference from a PC (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure Compaq and others already have hot-swap for cards, and support terabytes of storage (which is really just a matter of having enough FC bandwidth for whatever you're doing and plugging into the same standard storage arrays the Sun can).
Hot-swapping CPUs and RAM is trickier, but Sun only offers that on high end models which have no direct counterpart in the PC marketplace. Even then, it's a dicey situation at best.
With the E10K generation, you can hotswap CPU boards (there's 16 of them, each holding up to 4 processors, 4G ram, and two I/O busses (4x Sbus cards or 2x PCI cards). Thus you very much have to plan ahead to make sure you can "swap out" a given board without losing anything (oops, the failed memory is on the board with the only controller for this scsi disk over here, or the only one with this gigabit network connection). Assuming you built the machine right so that no single board is a single point of failure, you hit the next problem: If a CPU or memory module were to actually fail during runtime, it is still just as likely to cause an OS crash. The advantage is that in most cases the offending peice of hardware (1 CPU, 1 bank of RAM, etc) will be blacklisted and not used at all when the machine reboots from the panic (now you have a 15 CPU machine instead of 16). Then after that reboot, you can go about hot-swapping in a replacement with the OS online. You run some commands which basically tell the scheduler to stop scheduling on those CPUs, and tell the VM to not allocate any more physical ram in a certain region - then it goes about paging all the allocated RAM off to other ram or swap until it has emptied the board - then you can swap in the new stuff and re-add the CPU/mem into the OS.
On the newer SunFire architecture (3800s, 6800's, 15K, etc), they finally split the I/O boards from the CPU/Mem boards to make this a bit less painful, thank god. Still, in either case, you dont get a 4-way that scales to 64. You could buy a 64-capable machine (or higher now with SunFire architecture), and only populate it with 4 CPUs because you expect growth - but an E10K with just 4 CPUs in is a huge waste of cash - we're talking at least several hundred thousand dollars, for the hardware equivalent of what other companies sell for just a few thousand dollars. I think at one point a few years ago my company bought one 1/4 configured (16 CPU 16 GB ram) and left the other 3/4 open for expansion, and the cost was on the order of around $1,300,000. Do you really want to pay 50x+ over the same hardware capacity of a top end x86 just to be able to expand and have better support?
And in any case - these solutions, ultimately, may have slightly better sigma numbers on uptime, but they are still riddled with single points of failure, and ultimately no Sun solution is truly reliable with resorting to redundant clustering of oen sort or another. Once you resort to a redundant cluster, you're saying "I don't care if the hardware fails occasionally, my cluster will handle it while we do the maintenance". At that point, are you going to spend that much more money to make the difference between 99.9% and 99.999%?
Lets make a rough real example - a 24/7 Oracle database. In the Sun world, to get 24/7 uptime, you'd build out two machines of appropriate power (let's say 2x 6800s), and drop Oracle's OPS or RAC (or whatever they call the next generation) on it for a fully fault-tolerant cluster. You'd attach it to an FC SAN of appropriately configured redundant storage.
On the x86 side, you'd rack up the equivalent in I/O and CPU horsepower worth of 1U boxes (let's say 32x 1U dual processor large-ram crap-reliability boxes from Penguin Computing or something).
Either one is going to be very reliable because of Oracle's nonstop clustering stuff. You'll experience more failures/year on the x86 solution, but losing one of 32 machines is no biggie for a few hours while you drop in a spare.
Two fully loaded 6800's is gonna run you about $2.0 milli
Re:difference from a PC (Score:4, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Saturday January 06 2007, @01:13AM)
Not if you buy a mainframe class system from IBM or the other genuine high end vendors, which have things like redundant CPUs running the same code. If there's an error, the CPUs retry. If still bad, then the offending CPU or module is shutdown.
Consider Fujitsu if you still like SPARC, but want stuff like instruction retry.
http://www.ftsi.fujitsu.com/services/press/illu
Look at the IBM mainframe culture and history:
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/
Sun is a mainframe wannabe with decent marketing. They really aren't that far ahead of Dell if you look at the big picture.
Sun SPARC is actually lagging behind Fujitsu SPARC in performance and reliability.
Not saying Sun is dead or dying. But it doesn't look good does it?
HUH? (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Wednesday August 27 2003, @02:48PM)
/. editor turing test (Score:5, Funny)
YES
Since any computer could be programmed to check for dupes. Unless of course TacoAI is sooo devious that it intentionally posts dupes to make is _seem_ like there is a real human being.
When Taco starts singing "Daisy", then we'll know the truth.
Psychic Memesis? (Score:2)
(http://douglas.min.net/essay/)
Yeah, I'm considering using AMD's Opteron too (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday November 01 2004, @04:55AM)
deja vu (Score:1, Funny)
(http://www.philcrissman.com/)
Not a complete dupe... (Score:3, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
So it's only a dupe in general topic, but if that's a true dupe, then everything that says 'New hole found in MS software' should also be a dupe.
I can hardly wait! (Score:3, Funny)
Sun Considers Opteron (Score:2)
Slashcode dupe-check (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.hae.com)
This can be repeated for the poster...
Yay for dupes (Score:1)
(http://www.musicandstuff.net/ | Last Journal: Monday December 16 2002, @03:09PM)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/09/01562
Oh, wait...
Back Door Linux Strategy? (Score:2, Interesting)
With Linus saying he really likes 64-bit strategy of Opteron vs. Itanic, perhaps they want to keep their options open. See these articles:
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/02/25/
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=796
Well, aren't we all excited? (Score:1)
(http://anti-slash.org/)
Oh goodie. A monopolistic company that is almost as bad as Microsoft and would be worse if it could be. Sounds great.
Please assume its a dupe... (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Saturday February 05 2005, @03:50AM)
Slashdot Considers Slashdot (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.ircd-ratbox.org/)
Well...replacing most all of the proper nouns with Slashdot at least gave me a chuckle. Okay, so I'm retarded.
-AS
Wow.. (Score:3, Funny)
This just in... (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Friday December 06 2002, @12:24PM)
"Sun actually can rise again!???"
Think about it.
Smelling the coffee? (Score:2, Insightful)
Many pointy hairs are also awakening to the fact that Linux is evolving way faster then any previous OS in history. This realization is forcing many of them to position themselves in order to benefit from Linux. They are starting by replacing all of their low to medium-level extremely expensive UNIX solutions with Linux implementations, and waiting for Linux to overtake UNIX on the top tier. This saves them tons "in the meantime" and prepares them for the eventual replacement of their high-end solutions. Sun has to know that this scenario is inevitable and play along. Pride will only get you but so far.
McNealy has been fighting Linux for far too long, calling it "just another tool". I got news for you, all OS's are tools. Only this tool here can save your ass a ton while doing everything that every other tool promises to do on the low and medium ends.
Right now, Linux is "it" - and it shows no signs of slowing up. Microsoft makes their money off desktops and their office suite. UNIX makes money off stability and power. Stability and power is what the open source developers aim to improve. UNIX beware - evolve or perish, because you're next..
Serious Dupe Problem on Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.elliotjohnson.com/)
It's getting pretty rediculous. It wasn't always this bad.
Read between the lines (Score:2)
(http://www.lp.org/)
Either this is Sun-speak for "next year sometime", or they've really been engineering an Opteron-based server for some time and are now boxing it up for sale. Saying they're simply considering it doesn't add up in this case (unless they have super-EEs that can whip up a server with a new CPU from scratch in a couple months).
Enough! (Score:1)
OK, so the story has been run before. We get the message.
Reposted comments become as irritating as reposted stories after the first dozen or so...
L.
This would (Score:1)
Five varities of Linux, three BSD's, IBM's DB2, CA Ingres and Oracle have confirmed firm support for Opteron. Delaying Windows for this segment will mean that as Opteron becomes popular in the coming months, Linux will become the dominant operating system. This will mean a further boost to Linux.
A few months back, Sandia National labs signed up to put 10,000 Opteron's in a supercomputer named Red storm, which is supposed to become operational in 2004.
Fight Fight Fight, bleh. (Score:2)
(http://yro.slashdot.org/~twitter/journal/177855 | Last Journal: Friday December 07, @05:34PM)
AMD Chip (Score:2, Informative)
You're parked in the dark alone with your girl when she suddenly introduces you to Tammy and Buffy. "Girls Who Name Their Breasts" on the next Geraldo.
considers != planning to ship (Score:2)
btw, how come a Sun "rumour" story gets posted twice, but a product launch doesn't even get a mention? Anyone want a dual-processor 1U UltraSPARC system, with 4 1Gbit ethernet ports, advanced remote monitoring, dual SCSI and other goodies starting at $3000?
Here's a list of all the new products Sun released on Tuesday [sun.com]
Opteron? (Score:1)
(http://www.cyberarmy.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday February 13 2007, @01:10AM)
A perfect plan for Sun (Score:2)
While Suns do have their benefits, the company has been hurting because of several factors:
1. The cost boatloads of money.
2. Commodity hardware is catching up fast (and exceeding) with their lower-level servers
3. Software wedded to hardware.
The Opteron will give them extraoridinary value - a good, fast processer with buttloads of memory bandwidth at a far lower cost than the Sun processers. And it will let them offer competitively-priced low-to-midrange servers.
steve
They can't beat them, so they're joining them! (Score:3, Interesting)
Sun has been hurting for a while - PC-based servers have been increasingly eating up Sun's market.
The Opterons are aimed squarely at a market segment that was hitherto tied to Sun and one or two other companies. If you wanted a highly-scalable 4- or 8-way 64-bit machine, you bent over, and Sun/IBM/DEC found your bank roll along the way.
Now, machines of those natures are coming from a commodity vendor. With a 128-bit DDR333 memory interface, each processer will have far more memory bandwidth than even the new Sun iiia's that were introduced today. And HyperThreading gives some pretty respectable inter-processor bandwidth. You think that Sun shouldn't be shaking in their boots? You bet they should.
In the end, they know that they're not going to win the lower end of the market. They simply can't compete with the economies of scale that AMD and Intel enjoy. Embracing the future is their only way to ensure that they keep at least a portion of that market.
steve
Ultra Sparc IIIi ready to roll (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-IIIi/ [sun.com]
They do have some similarities to AMD's opteron processor:
- 1 MB on-chip L2 cache
- integrated memory controller
- 128bit DDR Ram
- large L1 cache
It should be interesting to compare those two processors.
What Sun Needs (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday October 23 2002, @05:38PM)
Given how much time Sun has lost on the Linux revolution compared to rivals IBM, HP and even Dell, they need to make a concerted push in less than two directions.
I think the Solaris/x86 effort dilutes the strength of Sun's commitment to Linux. They can say that there's cross fertilization, but they're sending a mixed message to their customers. Those customers, like me, have appreciated Sun's UNIX experience, their leading the way with things like NFS, RPC, NIS and Java, and their emphasis on hardware reliability and performance.
Those customers are looking at the economics of Linux/x86 and like what they see. That's bad for Solaris/SPARC, except where the big iron hangs out. And the cut-off transition from where x86 won't suffice to mainframes that will do the job keeps moving up the food chain. Sun's food chain. The lucrative high end is becoming an ever shrinking market.
What does Linux need that Sun can do better than others?
Where Sun can make a big difference is in enterprise level management. Big directory/authentication services; interoperable services for managing heterogeneous LANS. Performance tuned next generation NAS/SAN services.
Idea for Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.tzs.net/)
Hell, I only spend a few minutes a day reading slashdot, and I have no trouble instantly spotting the dupes, so it wouldn't be too onerous a burden on your editors, would it?
More SPARC fud! (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.lqx.net/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 08 2003, @10:41PM)
Sun Fires are massive boxes. Will all the options that PC's could only dream about: System partitioning, Hot swap _everything_, killer backplane speeds (quad-port fast ethernet cards anyone?)..
True the lone UltraSPARC processor is fairly unimpressive, but in an E12K you can have up to 256 of them if I recall. That's on one single, operating system. So take your silly 48-node Athlon clusters and go home.
Just trying to come to the defense of an arch that really isn't bad when you're not trying to run Lunix on it and play games with WineX.
And Taco Wonders why... (Score:2)
(http://strathearns.org/wds)
A glitch in the... (Score:1, Funny)
Taco: The Duplicates?
Morpheus: Do you want to know what THEY are? The Duplicates are everywhere. They are all around us, even now in this very forum. You can see them when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can read them when you go to work, when you go to user's groups, in the background when you do your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Taco: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave to techno news & discussion, Taco. Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.... Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Duplicates are. You have to see them for yourself. This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how many rabbits are in the hole.... Remember, all I'm offering is the truth, nothing more.... Follow me.... Cowboy Neal, are we online?
Cowboy Neal: Almost.
Morpheus: Time is always against us. Please, take a seat there.
Taco: You did all this?
Trinity: A-huh.
Morpheus: The pill you took is part of a trace program. It's designed to disrupt your input/output carrier signal so we can count the inputs.
Taco: What does that mean?
Cypher: It means buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye-bye.
Taco: Did you...
Morpheus: Have you ever read a story, Taco, that you were so sure was original. What if you were unable to tell the difference. How would you know the difference between the original story and the duplicate?
Taco: This can't be...
Morpheus: Be what? A duplicate?
Trinity: It's going into replication.
Morpheus: Cowboy Neal?
Cowboy Neal: Still nothing.
Taco: It's old. It's old.
Morpheus: Tank, we're going to need a signal soon.
Trinity: We've got fibrillation.
Morpheus: Cowboy Neal, location.
Cowboy Neal: Targeting almost there.
Trinity: It's going into arrest.
Cowboy Neal: Lock, I've got him.
Morpheus: Now, Tank. Now.
STUPID FUCKING MODS -- REDUNDANT??? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:non starter (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Monday February 16 2004, @04:04PM)
you from the 16th century?
Re:Dupe poop (Score:2)
(http://www.sorn.net/)