Sun signals closer technology ties with AMD

Posted on 12 Feb 2004 at 12:58

Sun has announced its quarterly product lineup, with new chips, support for AMD's 64bit Opteron and new servers.

Sun is taking a broad approach, focussing on using its own technologies and those of its partners to create comparable products to its competitors, but paring down the price and offering better performance.

It is attacking the low-end server market - the new Sun Fire V20z takes advantage of the new alliance with AMD. Sun representatives told us that the relationship with AMD is more than a standard OEM agreement - Sun is actually contributing to the development of the technology.

Incorporating the 64bit Opteron and running Java Enterprise System on either Solaris or Linux, prices start at £1,900. Sun executives told us it has been much anticipated not only because of the price, but also because the Opteron's ability to run existing 32bit applications natively means customers are not forced to reinvest in 64bit applications.

Next up, the Sun Fire B200x Blade Server boasts dual Intel Xeon chips in just a 3U box. Prices start from £2,650.

And then Sun's line of Throughput Computing Systems at the higher end, based on Sun's new UltraSPARC IV processor. The company's angle with the new chip was to address the problems created by processors scaling performance in line with Moore's Law, while increases in memory performance have not kept up. This causes a situation where the processor deals with a batch of data very quickly, but when it checks with memory for the next batch, the memory isn't ready to hand it across, leaving the processor spending significant proportions of its time waiting.

With Sun's UltraSparc IV, however, the chip will go back to memory and start a new thread. And the ability to run multiple threads simultaneously increases performance to such an extent that Sun is claiming new world records for a number of commercial benchmarks.

The new processors are clocked at 1.05 and 1.2GHz and can be found in the new Sun Fire E2900, E4900, E6900, E20K Server, and E25K Server systems costing from between £12,400 and £1m.

All the new servers are available in either March or April.

Sun has also introduced five new reference architectures so that customers can get the right equipment for the right job knowing they are not buying kit they don't really need or skimping on issues such as security.

The company has also announced a beta of the new Java platform - codenamed Project Tiger - and previewed the next version of its operating system - Solaris 10 - which boasts more than 600 new features including N1 Grid Containers partitioning technology and Predictive Self-Healing where, for example it can isolate a problematic area on the network, allowing the rest to function as normal.

It also revealed the N1 acronym as N computers operating as one...

Author: Matt Whipp