Japan’s Fujitsu and Sun Microsystems Inc have agreed to combine their server businesses, with high-end models to be made by a Fujitsu unit, a newspaper reported on Thursday. On other Sun news, they are ready to link Solaris x86 boxes into the SAN.
Fujitsu, Sun to Combine Server Operations-report
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The outsourcing of SPARC production to Texas Instruments has been one of Sun’s great shortfalls. This results in Sun paying considerable overhead on the processors in exchange for Texas Instruments manufacturing their processors with an inferior production process. Consequently, Sun’s UltraSPARC line has lagged behind Fujitsu’s SPARC64 line in process and performance.
By consolidating design and production efforts, the end result for Sun will be more inexpensive, better designed processors manufactured with a more modern process.
In other news, Sun has launched another inexpensive server system, the V250:
http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/BrowsePage.jhtml?cid=105039
This system offers two 1.28GHz UltraSPARC IIIi processors and 2GB of RAM as well as 150GB of 10000RPM hard drives for a mere $7000, a stark improvement over their workstation offerings such as the Blade 2000.
the configuration you mention is less than 6800, and it comes with rendundant power supplies, 2 GB of RAM and 1 MB of cache per CPU. Advanced lights-out management is just the kind of nicety that x86 servers just dream about. If they could dream, that is.
This is excellent news for SUN Microsystems. This was definitely a very good decision by SUN. This should decrease operating costs and pool research and develop, which should increase development progress – maybe they might stay competitive?
I am also very excited about Solaris x86 getting SAN support, this further validates Solaris on x86 hardware. This is a beautiful thing, leveraging storage networks with solaris on commodity server hardware!
the configuration you mention is less than 6800, and it comes with rendundant power supplies, 2 GB of RAM and 1 MB of cache per CPU.
The funny thing about 1MB cache of the UltraSPARC IIIi is that it’s the “low end” version of the UltraSPARC III, which typically comes with 8MB cache.
The outsourcing of SPARC production to Texas Instruments has been one of Sun’s great shortfalls. This results in Sun paying considerable overhead on the processors in exchange for Texas Instruments manufacturing their processors with an inferior production process. Consequently, Sun’s UltraSPARC line has lagged behind Fujitsu’s SPARC64 line in process and performance.
By consolidating design and production efforts, the end result for Sun will be more inexpensive, better designed processors manufactured with a more modern process.
I could never work it out either. There are a number of other companies who could have done exactly what TI provides but cheaper. UMC and TSMC, who produce the chips for Nvidia and IIRC, ATI. Considering that these GPU”s are a heck of alot more complex than a CPU these days, it would be pretty easy for them to deliver but without the hug costs.
Hopefully with the partnership their workstations not necessarily reduce in price because IMHO Blade 150 is priced quite nicely, I would liked to see improvements in the CPU speed, say from the IIi which is used now to a stripped down SPARC III with 512K L2 Cache and no L3 cache, also, the video card needs to be replaced, IIRC, the chip used is a basic ATI Rage 128 with around 8MB video memory. If they put something like a Radeon 9000, it would really push the performance up the scale.
Considering that these GPU”s are a heck of alot more complex than a CPU these days, it would be pretty easy for them to deliver but without the hug costs.
An UltraSPARC III CPU has considerably higher transistor count than a GPU, considering the 8MB of cache.
I’ve long heard that Fujitsu’s SPARC64 line is considerably faster then Sun’s in almost every way. 🙂 I just hope this doesn’t mean Sun will forcefully kill off the more advancanded SPARC64 line in favor of their own, the whole NIH syndrome. 🙂 I wish Sun luck.
I notice that just abotu every, if not every, Sun machine ships with Solaris 8 per default versus the new (but not so new, isn’t it a year old now?) and higher performing Solaris 9. I can understand the need for backwards compatibility and conservative updates, but isn’t Solaris 9 more or less a minor upgrade? It would seem to me to be more of a 8.1 release, the “new” threading library was already in 8 as a selectable option, and all else seems minor. They finally ship SSH per default, new more advannced page coloring, etc etc. Nothing as radically improved as Solaris 8 was compared to 7. Anyone know when Sun will start to fully standardize on Solaris 9?
These are super news. Because Fujitsu and Sun Microsystems are only two companies wich love SPARC. They two are the best.
I love them.
I think Sun ships Solaris 8 on servers, because they understand their customers value maturity over bleeding-edge. You can certainly get Solaris 9, if you want it, and I would expect Solaris 9 to become the default OS eventually. Also, I don’t think Solaris 9 is a minor upgrade; rather, it is a full revision of the OS (like Windows 2000 –> Windows XP…except much better, of course).
“An UltraSPARC III CPU has considerably higher transistor count than a GPU, considering the 8MB of cache.”
The 8MB of cache is on separate chips from the CPU for the UltraSPARC III. I believe the 1MB cache is integrated onto the UltraSPARC IIIi, which offsets some of the disadvantages of the smaller cache.