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.
I don’t like my big brothers, they always beat me up when I was little
and if wwf wrestling was on, watch out!
According to the person’s http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2006/01/suns-marketing-out-to-confuse-wo… , Sun also intends to release a Ultra 45 model, though it will be a SPARC machine.
According to the person’s http://uadmin.blogspot.com/, Sun also intends to release a Ultra 45 model, though it will be a SPARC machine.
Confusing or what, eh? It looks like Sun are doing what they usually do – apparently committing to something that is obviously the way forwards and then going back to SPARC, again, and confusing everyone. SPARC is a server, and a higher-end one at that, processor and has no place on a workstation in this day and age. It simply increases the support costs and plays havoc with those who are using binaries on different machines…….
Really, if they’re actually going to continue to sell SPARC machines then there was no point in running any of their workstations on Opterons. It just seems as if Sun want to muddy the waters to me.
SPARC has a purpose even on the desktop, it gives you a way to test and code programs for the servers, anything from a simple 1cpu 1U server to the large servers with over 140 cores, yes you can run the same code on them all so there is a reason for a SPARC desktop.
The complaint is about the naming, that causes confusion with the consumers. If a brand new, ultra 40 is an opteron most people would think that an ultra 45 is related, they should of kept to there current naming of calling SPARC workstations blade. as in the blade 2500.
And if you want to see another reason for having sparc hardware check out the new T1 chip in the T1000 and T2000 servers, 1 RU and 2RU packages, that use less watts, and are faster than intel and amd chips at specific server tasks.
yes you can run the same code on them all so there is a reason for a SPARC desktop.
You don’t need to muddy your desktop line to do that.
If a brand new, ultra 40 is an opteron most people would think that an ultra 45 is related, they should of kept to there current naming of calling SPARC workstations blade.
Rule 1: Always work out what you’re selling and where. Sell SPARC workstations everywhere if that’s what you want.
T1 chip in the T1000 and T2000 servers, 1 RU and 2RU packages, that use less watts, and are faster than intel and amd chips at specific server tasks.
So what are the running any of their stuff on Opterons for if SPARC is that good? And don’t say ‘to run Windows’ or ‘to run Red Hat’ because that simply doesn’t make any sense.
So what are the running any of their stuff on Opterons for if SPARC is that good? And don’t say ‘to run Windows’ or ‘to run Red Hat’ because that simply doesn’t make any sense.
Because they are giving the customers what they have been asking for?
Because if they sell Opterons as well as SPARC they sell more machines and make more money?
Because the different CPUs have different strengths and are useful in different situations?
Because you want to be able to run Windows and Redhat and Solaris all on the same box?
Because they are giving the customers what they have been asking for?
Customers aren’t asking for it. You give your customers a line of workstations (or servers) that are clear and related to each other. You don’t muck about by offering what ‘you think’ customers want because you really want them to be using SPARC.
Because if they sell Opterons as well as SPARC they sell more machines and make more money?
In what way? What makes Opterons outsell SPARC? And if it’s outselling SPARC then sell Opterons exclusively. It’s obviously a selling point. All you’ve told me there is that Opterons outsell SPARC.
Because the different CPUs have different strengths and are useful in different situations?
Not on workstations, as I’ve pointed out. SPARC is a high-end processor, and that’s its only domain now. If Sun want to sell it as a workstation and convince customers then they need to make it clear to customers what they are selling. If customers are scratching their heads about what you sell, and you are confusing them with talk about ‘choice’ and the non-existent ‘different strengths’, then they simply go elsewhere.
Because you want to be able to run Windows and Redhat and Solaris all on the same box?
That’s a selling point for selling Opterons (and a weak one at that considering Sun want you to use Solaris), so what’s the point of SPARC?
Look, we all know that Sun don’t really want to sell anything that doesn’t have SPARC in it, so they’ve got one of two options. Commit totally to what is actually selling (Opterons), or make SPARC an actual viable option on workstations, or many servers, and stick with it. The market has spoken on that front, and that is ‘what customers want’.
Customers aren’t asking for it. You give your customers a line of workstations (or servers) that are clear and related to each other. You don’t muck about by offering what ‘you think’ customers want because you really want them to be using SPARC.
Don’t talk nonsense. Just skim the threads here when the Ultra 20 got released– many people were asking for a SPARC-based workstation from Sun, simply because many, including myself, have a SPARC workstation that badly needs replacing (my aging Ultra 5). Now, for what do I use an UltraSPARC? Reliability. I want UltraSPARC workstations from Sun because they do not die. They do not break. They are as solid as a rock.
Of course Sun wants to sell SPARC machines. But do you really think they would go through ALL the trouble of setting up, designing (they even hired a world-famous server designer to design Opteron servers), multiple Opteron product lines, JUST, to, after months and months, release one SPARC line of workstations?
Go fool yourself, Segedendum. The rest of us ain’t buying it.
Don’t talk nonsense. Just skim the threads here when the Ultra 20 got released– many people were asking for a SPARC-based workstation from Sun, simply because many, including myself, have a SPARC workstation that badly needs replacing (my aging Ultra 5). Now, for what do I use an UltraSPARC? Reliability. I want UltraSPARC workstations from Sun because they do not die. They do not break. They are as solid as a rock.
So are you saying that Sun’s Opteron systems aren’t solid as a rock? Because if it’s not that then it sounds like your just like the poor MIPS guys who wish they could go back to the good old days when people cared about MIPS and SGI. And if it is that they aren’t solid as a rock, why is anyone encouraging people to buy shoddy Opteron hardware from Sun?
Of course Sun wants to sell SPARC machines. But do you really think they would go through ALL the trouble of setting up, designing (they even hired a world-famous server designer to design Opteron servers), multiple Opteron product lines, JUST, to, after months and months, release one SPARC line of workstations?
You make it sound like Sun isn’t completely schizo. After watching them for the past 5 years, however, I could completely believe that they’d do backflips to sell Opterons today and then stop selling them and go all Sparc tomorrow. And then three months later recant and sell Opterons again but have their executives bad mouth Opterons every time they speak. That’s entirely consistent with their Solaris x86 strategy, their Linux strategy and their support for open source. Why not make it their hardware strategy too?
SPARC-based workstation from Sun, simply because many, including myself, have a SPARC workstation that badly needs replacing (my aging Ultra 5). Now, for what do I use an UltraSPARC?
And how many of you are there?
I want UltraSPARC workstations from Sun because they do not die. They do not break. They are as solid as a rock.
Good for you. The vast majority of Sun’s new customers do not now buy SPARC though.
But do you really think they would go through ALL the trouble of setting up, designing
Done it before.
Go fool yourself, Segedendum. The rest of us ain’t buying it.
It’s alright. I know you don’t understand this, and neither do Sun.
Look, we all know that Sun don’t really want to sell anything that doesn’t have SPARC in it,
They bought a company that designed Opteron servers then proceeded to sell them at a market competitive price. 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.
so they’ve got one of two options. Commit totally to what is actually selling (Opterons), or make SPARC an actual viable option on workstations, or many servers, and stick with it.
Or option 3. Sell Opteron and SPARC systems, with both being viable options.
The market has spoken on that front, and that is ‘what customers want’.
I think the market is speaking by buying both SPARC and Opteron systems from Sun.
Sun may be looking to dump SPARC altogether, but I doubt it. Even if they were they wouldn’t do it until Opteron (or some other chip) could replace their high end servers which won’t happen for some time.
I lament the almost lack of decent, cheap SPARC workstations from Sun, I think it harms their business becuase people grow up with Linux on x86 instead. Sun have, finally, decided that they ought to be making some money from the huge x86 market. I’m glad they did.
Sun may be looking to dump SPARC altogether, but I doubt it. Even if they were they wouldn’t do it until Opteron (or some other chip) could replace their high end servers which won’t happen for some time.
They won’t for at least another ten years. They just released the Niagara 8-core SPARC chips, and Niagara II is in the pipeline and due early 2007.
They just released the Niagara 8-core SPARC chips, and Niagara II is in the pipeline and due early 2007.
If they execute that right and on time you could see a return to SPARC workstations on people’s desks. A Niagra II based workstation would be a wonderful development platform for multithreaded apps.
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.
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.
“So what are the running any of their stuff on Opterons for if SPARC is that good? And don’t say ‘to run Windows’ or ‘to run Red Hat’ because that simply doesn’t make any sense.”
Sorry to tell you, but that makes absolutely real sense.
Windows and RHEL WS work perfectly, and on hardware that is designed between AMD and the Sun engineers. I am getting an Ultra 20 (Dual Core) next year when Vista comes out. And I will have both Red Hat and Microsoft operating systems on it.
SPARC is good for Solaris, no doubt.
It’s not confusing at all. Sun sell workstations which
are SPARC or Opteron based. You buy whay you need. Your
statments are nothing more than negative spin. I mean,
most people by computers to run something called
software. This tends to have a bearing on the type of
hardware that you want to run.
….How can 8 RAM slots capable of holding up to 2 GB DIMMs each suddently hold 32 GB, as Sun and our blogger claims??
…Just wondering
probably because at the moment, 4GB dimms have not be released yet, so Sun use the lower number of 16GB, but still hint that the motherboard and chipset can support more.
Found this:
http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/government/florida/Gov/82.h…
and got this:
A71-NPB2-AD-4GB-DR $5,395 E Ultra 40 – 254, 4GB, FX1400 New
A71-NWB1-AJ-1GB-DR $2,295 E Ultra 40 – 246, 1GB, NVS285 New
A71-PFB2-AK-8GB-DS $7,795 E Ultra 40 – 280, 8GB, FX3450 New
Time to harse some VAR!!!
overlooked this entry:
A71 $0 E Sun Ultra 40 XATO Model New
Not really I just posted the prices closest to being true
Look a few lines above the Ultra 40 prices and you’ll see the Ultra 45 prices as well.
A little digging around using Ultra 45 as a start also turned up Sun Fire V215 and Sun Fire V445 as new machine names.
—
Phillip Fayers http://phillipfayers.blogspot.com/
OR it’s a complete fake. The sections on the diagnostic partition are just laugh out loud funny stuff.
So this is a pc clone, albeit with rather nice specs.
Now, why should I buy a dual opteron box for $(huge) from sun, when i can basically build a quad opteron box for less?
Because the sun box runs hardware that solaris/x86 is certified for? Ok, if i really need solaris/x86.
Why do I need Solaris? Because i have some legacy apps in my company that run on solaris and have been awfully expensive… But wait, they all run on solaris/sparc…
Why do we buy computers from Dell, when we can build a cheaper one ourselves? Because time is of value and we want better quality than you (typically) get from building a box yourself.
Please dont think that a sun box featuring opterons means that the whole box is somehow made up of mediocre components. This isn’t the case.
You can make a cheaper computer than Dell? I”d love to see that – because everytime I’ve looked at both sides of the equation, the home built kit aways ends up turning out to be atleast a few hundred dollars more than the equally spec’ed out Dell.
Btw, I do think the default is a dual core – but the option is give I guess as not all need or what the power that a quad core could bring, and the licencing mess that follows it as well.
perhaps, you are running a business, and perfer to have someone there to maintain your systems, how cheap are those white boxes when you have to put a fleet a techs just to argue with the OEMs that they should replace the component and begging for RMA’s. With Sun when you have problem, call sun they say send us the broken parts, your replacements are in the mail. And of course the parts are high quality. You can also upgrade to platnium support, and sun will be knocking on your door in less than 4 hours, there goal is 2 hours, asking to see the machine and repair it.
BTW most of those cheap white boxes dont have 8 dimm slots or 2x pci-e 16x slots. neither do they have 4x plug in play sata hotswap drives, no screws, release a lever, pull out old drives, push in new drive.
you get what you pay for.
Yeah, I can buy a Ultra20 for lower price when Sun starts to sell this machines 🙂 The Ultra 20 supports dualcore too, it’s a great machine to multiboot environments such as Linux/Solaris/Windows
of course… but even with that in mind, i can get a box with more or less the same specs for less, and from a big brandname vendor, with support and all…
I seriously doubt it, not signifigantly less at any rate. I’d love for you to prove me wrong, but I doubt it will happen. Unlike in the past Suns new AMD based line are very price competative no matter who you compare against.
Is there anyone who has any good benchmarks comparing Opteron machines with the regular AMD64 (athlons I believe)?
I know clockspeed ain’t of the essence, but just for the sake of comparison, how fast is a Opteron 2ghz vs a 64bit Athlon 3800+ ???
Opteron and Athlon 64 are the same processor; some models have different amounts of cache.
“So what are the running any of their stuff on Opterons for if SPARC is that good? And don’t say ‘to run Windows’ or ‘to run Red Hat’ because that simply doesn’t make any sense.”
FPU intensive tasks?
It seems a lot of ppl here are posting with opinions that don’t seem to consider the situation of others.
I work for in a large corporate we are heavy users of Sparc/Solaris and HP-Compaq/Suse Linux in our datacenters.
Although the cost of hardware is significant it deprecates over 3 years, the far bigger cost is that of SA’s admin time and datacenter changes (including items such as power, networking, tape libraries e.t.c.), something we are billed at a rate of approximately 15,000 USD per year per 4U unix server.
So to develop and test software, instead of incurring this large datacenter charge we tend to use Sun SPARC deskside systems (current we have a handful of SunBlade 150s, but it is only a matter of the complexity of software outgrows the memory/CPU available and we will need to upgrade to something new )
So there is certainly going to be at least one customer continuing to want Sun SPARC workstations.
The 2nd item I’ve seen posted a few times is why anyone would consider buying a Sun x86 box, when you can get a DELL for a cheaper price. Well I for one I certainly considering doing so !
Not for work, but for home, I currently run Dell Precision 450 at home in a dualboot Linux/Windows configuration. But this is really because this was the only relatively well constructed x86 machines that were available at the time. When I come to update this box in a few years I expect that there will be x86 compatible hardware from both Sun + Apple on the market. And the build quality of Sun + Apple as anyone who uses one will appreciate is an order of magnitude above that of Dell.