Someone has found the manual to Sun's Ultra 40 - which hasn't even been announced yet. The machine clearly is the bigger brother of the Ultra 20. It apparently sports two AMD Opteron processors (single or dualcore; 2.0Ghz or faster; 1MB cache), eight PC3200 DIMM slots (2GB per DIMM), and more. It will come pre-loaded with Solaris 10 (obviously) but RedHat/SUSE Linux Enterprise/Windows are also supported, in both 32bit and 64bit.
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Member since:2005-12-14
They are not buying both SPARC and Opteron. Just about all of Sun's new customers, where the new business is to be found, buy Opteron.
Exactly. If Sun didn't have Opteron they wouldn't be picking up that new business and the company would be weaker for it.
When it comes down to it Sun's main product has always been Solaris. They manage to sell hardware because people want stuff which runs Solaris.
That's exactly what they should have done.
Sun fund all of the development costs of the low end SPARC chips. Similar costs for x86 CPUs are spread across all the companies which buy them from AMD and Intel. Sun simply couldn't keep up with the cash which Intel and AMD were (are) throwing at improving their CPUs. It took a financial crisis to make them think outside the box and go for broke with Niagra (and Rock).
Niagra was such a departure that it even caught Sun's own people unawares. The new storage boxes (Thumper and Honeycomb) which Sun are working on are Opteron based - when a Niagra would have been a perfect fit for the workload.
Member since:
2005-07-06
They negotiated with AMD to get a special Sun version of the AMD CPUs manufactured. Sounds like a company who wants to sell something which isn't SPARC.
It's happened before.
Or option 3. Sell Opteron and SPARC systems, with both being viable options.
There is no option 3. Customers want to know what you're selling.
I think the market is speaking by buying both SPARC and Opteron systems from Sun.
They are not buying both SPARC and Opteron. Just about all of Sun's new customers, where the new business is to be found, buy Opteron.
I lament the almost lack of decent, cheap SPARC workstations from Sun
That's exactly what they should have done.