Sun Microsystems to use Opteron in workstations?

[dimmreaper]

http://www.theinquirer.net/08050215.htm

My only question now is what OS will they be using. I'm hoping for a Solaris X86 to X86-64 port . . . .

[mrpcman]

That's gotta be big news for AMD.

[dimmreaper]

I don't know if it's big news but it's certainly not bad news. Workstations are a high-margin low-volume product, AMD's business model on the other hand is geared toward high-volume and low-margin. So sure it would benefit AMD to sell these few more CPUs, but they'd be much better off landing a big high-volume deal with a big PC system integrator like Gateway, IBM, HP and the like . . .

AMD's sweat spot in recent years has been with "white box" system integrators, if AMD wants to make Intel hurt bad there going to have to get there foot in the door with some larger system integrators . . .

[cloasters]

I may be wrong about this! I read that the(Sun's)Ultra-Sparc II and Ultra-Sparc III processors are rather wimpy. If this is true, they'd have to benefit from adopting Opteron's--at least it looks that way from outside the fish bowl.

I'd assume(always dangerous) that the first "Clawhammer" Opteron CPU's wouldn't be up to the task of taking over for "real RISC" CPU's. If the second series of "Sledgehammer" Opteron CPU's can stand in for Sparc III's(not as a direct replacement, but a good replacement with some clever engineering??) it looks like a win-win sitch for both Sun and AMD. The under-performing(AFAIK) Ultra-Sparc III's could die a quiet death, and who would really miss them?

Sun, of course. However, it may cost Sun so much money to design and fab the miniscule(compared to Opteron and Xeon production runs)amount of Ultra-Sparc III's, that they'd be glad to cease making the things. As long as Scott McNealy's(sp?) pride can stand the blow!

[dimmreaper]

Ultra-Sparc III's are monsters at some things. Sun is probably going to use the Opteron's in a four-way configuration for entry-level workstations, as this solution offers more bang for buck.

Clawhammer is only called Opteron when used in a dual CPU configuration. The rest of the time it is an Athlon, officially. AMD has yet to release exact details on how the K8 Athlon name will vary from the K7 Athlon. Possibilities are "Athlon 64", "Athlon XP-64", and "Athlon XP+".

Sledgehammer is not a second series, but rather a different series targeted at a different market. Sledgehammer has a second hyper-transport bus to facilitate 4 and 8 way configurations, and offers double the L2 cache(1M vs. 512K).