In their joint announcement, Intel agreed to support the Solaris OS, while Sun will use a number of different Xeon processors in its x86 line of servers and workstations. In a collaboration that one CEO called ‘historic’, Sun Microsystems and Intel jointly announced a new partnership that will see both companies support the other’s technology. The announcement, which had first been reported in the Wall Street Journal and formally detailed at a joint news conference in San Francisco on Jan. 22, will allow Sun to develop x86 servers using Intel’s Xeon processors.
… really interesting. Intel has been putting out some good chips lately, and they’re only going to get better. The one area they are lacking (which really impacts servers much more than workstations) is in bus-bandwidth.
AMD really one-upped Intel in this area with Hypertransport/on-die memory controllers, hopefully Intel will come out with something to match. It’s always been Sun’s position to market overall throughput, and Intel systems have a “sore thumb” so-to-speak in this area.
The CPUs are killer though, I’ve got a couple core/core2 systems and they are *great*. Very stable, very fast, and don’t draw much power.
The upcoming year looks pretty interesting!
(PS – Anybody gotten the webcast to play? I hate Real, all I got was a Sun logo / Intel logo on the page this morning, maybe now it’s working? Time to go check…)
The one area they are lacking (which really impacts servers much more than workstations) is in bus-bandwidth.
And how exact the bus bandwith impacts Core2-based servers performance? Care to provide any numbers?
Depends on the work that needs to be done, and whether the bandwidth issues can be hidden by having a very large cache.
With that being said, CSI is apparently going to be introduced along with some other nifty features to address the said bandwidth issues.
So Sun will discontinue Opteron servers now?
.V
No, it says it will sell them both.
I believe this is a great announcement. Having the name Intel there is a very good thing for Sun and will get people interested in Solaris, which will translate into better hardware compatiblitiy, which has always been Solaris’ biggest drawback.
We have been trying to standardize on CPU architecture for our x86 machines at work, using HP DL385/DL585’s and we have been happy with the performance we are getting out of the machines. If we chose to purchase Sun x86 hardware, we would have chosen it in part because of the Opteron processor. The V20z’s we have work well enough and are for the most part trouble free.
I just hope that this does not come to bite Sun in the ass, just as people are “getting on board” with Sun, they change processor vendors.
I just hope that this does not come to bite Sun in the ass, just as people are “getting on board” with Sun, they change processor vendors.
Except they aren’t changing, they’re *adding*. Jonathan made it very clear during the presentation that this would sit “right beside” their AMD line.
At no time has Sun said they will drop AMD.
From my reading of the announcement (not speaking for my employer), we will continue to source from both.
Tp.
So… now the big three UNIX systems vendors (IBM, HP, Sun) are all onboard with the two-party system in x86-land. You can interpret this as a historical milestone for the not-so-little instruction set architecture that could. He’s moving up in the world. Just look at those sexy backplane interconnects and cool marketecture. That’s not a PC. That’s a BladeCenter. Wow.
Ìf I were Steve Ballmer, I would be sweating. Anyone else, feel free to applaud. This is good for everyone (except Microsoft).
Why, you can run windows on sun blades and sun servers as well. SUN even SUPPORTS windows running on their servers.
I prefer to se solaris run on sun hardware, but that does not change the fact that windows can be run.
Of course you can. However, that’s not why they should be worried.
The reason they should be worried is this: For 20 years, Microsoft have said “We’re the only BASIC interpreter/OS/word processor/office suite/internet browser company you’ll EVER need!”, and generally speaking, people have believed them. So they have 90% of the desktop market, and an unfathomably large chunk of the server market, too.
But now, people are starting to look and think, “Erm, no you’re not.” And so the only way they can go is down.
Even worse for them, despite the proliferation of other OS vendors, all the other contenders either are a Unix (Solaris, *BSD), look like it (Linux), or can run Unix software in some fashion (MacOS X, which is built on Unix but runs a proprietary GUI). Even if Microsoft go all out promoting “Services for Unix”, a Windows installation that only runs Unix software is a Windows than can be replaced with a Unix.
[unintentional duplicate post deleted]
Edited 2007-01-23 07:29