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Sun Microsystems Hardware

New Server Chip Niagara 307

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the sounds-like-and-still-gets-you-excited dept.
* * Beatles-Beatles writes "Sun recently announced their latest release in server technology. The UltraSparc T1 processor, code-named Niagara, has eight computing engines on a single chip, with each core capable of handling up to four tasks at once." With this new processor Sun hopes to get a leg up on the competition. The Niagra chip is being billed as an "eco-friendly" chip because of its low power requirements. From the article: " [...] removing the world's Web servers and replacing them with half the number of UltraSparc T1-based systems would have the same effect on carbon dioxide emissions as planting 1 million trees."
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New Server Chip Niagara

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  • Sun has the fix for global warming! (Score:5, Funny)

    by sgtboost ( 915361 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:53AM (#14025413)
    Just buy their new processor...it's equivalent to planting a megajillion trees!
    • Unfortunately, it won't solve the global warming problem - because if everyone switched their web servers to the Sun machines, that would only be used as an excuse to log another million trees for some short-sighted profit...

  • nasty stuff (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:53AM (#14025421)
    What about all the real nasty chemicals that go into the manufacturing process of chips .. eg arsenic and acid !!!

    • Re:nasty stuff (Score:2, Interesting)

      by youngerpants ( 255314 )
      Arsenic = Naturally occuring substance (you know when potatoes grow a green scum... thats arsenic)

      Acid = Oh no, not acid, which type, I really hope it isnt ascorbic acid, nasty that one, I try to avoid it at all costs... hey, my teeth have all fallen out

      • Re:nasty stuff (Score:5, Insightful)

        by moro_666 ( 414422 ) <kulminaator@ g m a i l.com> on Monday November 14, 2005 @09:49AM (#14025796) Homepage
        indeed, you have acid's all over the place.

        alcohol is acid, quite a weak one, but still having the effects and reactions as the rest of acids have.
        most of the batteries that you throw into your ipod contain acid, so does the battery in your car.
        if you let CO2 and water together, they create a nice (and a bit unstable) carbonic acid, and that is basically all over the place.
        even your body contains so many acids that i would get a ban on slashdot for even naming all of these.
        compared to the acids created by gasoline engines and powerstations in the atmosphere, the electionics production isn't even worth mentioning.

        sun is making the right move, more computing power for less watt-per-hour, and if they can spare the energy used during producing too, it's even better (and more profitable for them, since they pay for that). having a 200W P4 screaming under your table just to play solitaire is really wicked from the energetic point of view. so is driving an engine overbloated suv just to get one fat butt from one place to another. regular swedish buses that carry 30 people have the same size of engines as hummers or corvettes, sniffing the word 'wasted' anywhere ?

        while this cpu will be nogood for playing doom3, it will be a very good chip for handling many many many threads'n'processes at once and therefor be ideal for running webservers and mailservers and other type of multiple client handling services. way to go sun, i hope amd will do an amd athlon 64 X32 some time soon too :)

        too bad i can't afford this stuff anytime soon :(

        sadly when you are interested in the price of the latest server, you're not rich enough to buy it

      • > Naturally occuring substance

        It always puzzles me, how people think, that natural is some indicator for being harmless. You know, like: "Here my love, take that medecine, it is made from plants, perfectly harmless, all natural", which triggers my reposte, "So, is a cup of hemlock ".

        What puzzles me even more, is that you take such a perfect counter-example [wikipedia.org] as an argument.

        • > Naturally occuring substance

          It always puzzles me, how people think, that natural is some indicator for being harmless.

          Moreover, it's nigh impossible to define substances as 'natural' and 'unnatural'. IMHO, nature == the universe, and everything that exists is natural -- whether or not manufactured by individuals of a certain species. Things that don't exist are supernatural :)

    • Re:nasty stuff (Score:5, Insightful)

      by wytcld ( 179112 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @09:17AM (#14025581) Homepage
      Chips will be manufactured anyway. The question is what the useful lifetime of the chips that are manufactured is, and what the power consumption of those chips over their lifetime will be, in ratio to the work they perform.

      Sparc's strength in the early Internet days was always throughput - even under load - rather than speed. Sun also built more reliable hardware. I switched from Sun to AMD/Linux for Webservers early on, but with energy costs rising quickly, I'll be taking another look at Sun. Where these probably can matter most is for large Web farms, which currently tend to be commodity Linux boxen. But those are throw-away machines - chips headed onward to the landfill after just a couple years.
      • I like Sun hardware, always have. But what happens when in "just a couple of years", these Sun chips aren't all that fast anymore? Do you keep them around just because you paid a lot for them?

        That's the *benefit* of the so-called throw away machines. They're cheap. They are pretty fast. Lots and lots of bang for the buck. If you go with a really expensive Sun box, you can't do that.

        • Re:nasty stuff (Score:3, Interesting)

          by AKAImBatman ( 238306 )
          I like Sun hardware, always have. But what happens when in "just a couple of years", these Sun chips aren't all that fast anymore? Do you keep them around just because you paid a lot for them?

          I don't know about you, but I can always find a use for a Sun machine. They're built to last, and can often still be useful for a decade after their manufacture. The worst case is that you can resell your old machines to a refurbisher like AnySystem [anysystem.com] so that it can gain new life in someone else's possession. I know of p

      • Re:nasty stuff (Score:5, Informative)

        by InvalidError ( 771317 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @11:07AM (#14026609)
        "Sparc's strength in the early Internet days was always throughput - even under load"

        Are you implying that you can have useful throughput under no load? How do you measure this idle throughput advantage?

        The Intel/AMD architectures are historically single-threaded desktop-centric where the most important thing usually is to run one thing really fast. Sun, however, was always in the HPC/workstation game where overall throughput matters most, latencies and single-thread performance be damned. These two groups were playing pretty different games up to recently.

        But now, Intel/AMD have hit a GHz and complexity brick wall. They are forced to promote multi-threading multi-core at the desktop-level and optimize their future desktop chip designs for multi-threaded application throughput rather than single-threaded performance. Imagine what would happen if AMD and Intel could afford to quit competing on single-threaded performance overnight: goodbye complex deep out-of-order execution, goodbye branch-prediction and speculative execution - those transistors would be much better spent on implementing quad-threading cores to keep every pipeline filled with useful instructions that will retire cleanly on every clock.

        Sacrificing single-thread performance for simultaneous multi-threaded throughput in the above-described way has been the name of Sun's game for the last few years.

        Obsession with single-threaded performance is what costs current x86 CPUs the most power. Of course, in the P4/HT case, there is the added power and transistor costs of trying to be a jack-of-all-trades who predictably turned out as a master-of-none. (The P4's uOP replay engine is a neat idea... but re-executing the same stupid uOPs until they meet retirement conditions is woefully wasteful, whoever designed and bothered to patent this should be fired.)
    • A friend of mine was showing me a chip fabricating lab, and pointed out an alarm that went off if there was an accidental release of a certain chemical. He also pointed out that if that alarm were to go off, only people right next to the exit would survive....

  • There must be 100 better sources [google.co.uk] out there to link to.

  • Easy (Score:5, Funny)

    by Laz10 ( 708792 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:54AM (#14025424)
    Let's go plant some trees then.

    It is a pretty safe bet that 1 million trees are way cheaper than Sun technology.

  • Better link (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:54AM (#14025431)
    Better link here [sun.com].

  • Right. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Skye16 ( 685048 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:55AM (#14025438)
    " [...] removing the world's Web servers and replacing them with half the number of UltraSparc T1-based systems would have the same effect on carbon dioxide emissions as planting 1 million trees."
    I'm sure it would. But then, after replacing all these servers with the UltraSparc T1-based systems, we'd have to cut down 1 million trees just to print the money Sun would be making back in profit. Weeee!
    • Curses, beaten to it. You ommited the golden phrase "gigantic sacks of cash" though.
    • Yes, because when I order a server over the mail or the internet, I pay only in $1 bills, because I want to keep myself safe from identity theft. Paper money... I love it! 3

    • Re:Right. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @09:16AM (#14025575) Homepage
      "[...] removing the world's Web servers and replacing them with half the number of UltraSparc T1-based systems would have the same effect on carbon dioxide emissions as planting 1 million trees."

      Removing the world's Web servers and not replacing them at all would have an even better effect on carbon dioxide emissions.

      I'm curious as to how they calculated it, though. Are they talking 1 year running time or 100? Are they taking into account the energy required to build those new systems? Do they supply the new hardware's manuals on paper? How does it compare to a similar scenario using other replacement hardware?
      • Also, what kind of trees are we talking? What size/age? Are we talking lil' 3' high sprouts? Or 100 year old oaks?
    • Sadly, all of the new Sun CPUs are made out of wood.

    • Re:Right. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anarke_Incarnate ( 733529 )
      At least in the US, money is printed on cotton pulp and not wood pulp.

  • raw power (Score:5, Interesting)

    by emptybody ( 12341 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:58AM (#14025451) Homepage Journal
    Niagara systems take the concept of dual core processors (with which most of you are familiar), and goes to an absolute extreme - building 8 cores, each capable of running 4 jobs simultaneously (4 threads), onto a single chip. Doing the math, we'll be delivering a 32-way chip, running 9.6GHz, which sips power (about 70 watts). [sun.com], JonathanSchwartz BLOG.

    This is why I got into Sysadmin 15 years ago.
    To play with big honkin fast machines and new technology that makes your head spin.
    Just musing about the name. Think of your kitchen sink faucet.
    Now think of all the faucets in your house turned on at once.
    Now think of all the faucets on your street turned on too.
    Add all the faucets in your community.
    Keep on thinking of how many faucets in how many communities it would take to equal the raw power behind something so large as Niagra falls.

    Am I hooked?
    You bet.

    • Re:raw power (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rkhalloran ( 136467 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @09:58AM (#14025897) Homepage
      For a lot of uses today, a swarm of processors like this makes more sense than driving one CPU hellishly fast so it can task-switch quick enough to get around to everything.

      Sun traditionally has been very good at engineering the interconnects so I expect the actual throughput on this is pretty good.

      Will be interesting to see how well this does.
    • Just musing about the name. Think of your kitchen sink faucet.
      Now think of all the faucets in your house turned on at once.
      Now think of all the faucets on your street turned on too.
      Add all the faucets in your community.
      Keep on thinking of how many faucets in how many communities it would take to equal the raw power behind something so large as Niagra falls.

      Dude. The water in my house all comes thru a 3/4" pipe. Turning all the faucets on would mean that they all dribble. Turn on the whole neighborhood, and

  • What about I/O? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Max Romantschuk ( 132276 ) <max@romantschuk.fi> on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:58AM (#14025453) Homepage
    Eight cores at four threads is 32 simultaneous threads. Nice, but what about memory bandwith? Each thread needs proper I/O if this is actually going to do any good... Anyone have any real info on this marchitecture?

    • Re:What about I/O? (Score:5, Informative)

      by SQL Error ( 16383 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @09:06AM (#14025505)
      Specs here [sun.com]. Four 144-bit DDR2-533 interfaces. That's more memory bandwidth than a quad-Opteron system.
      • "That's more memory bandwidth than a quad-Opteron system."

        Yes, but with considerably more latency. DDR2 is great until you realize that the latency effectively kills any performance advantage you had with higher clocks. DDR2-533 is about as fast as DDR-400.

        • Re:What about I/O? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Paul Jakma ( 2677 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @11:07AM (#14026610) Homepage Journal
          The whole point of Niagara is to get higher throughput *despite* memory latencies.

        • Re:What about I/O? (Score:2, Insightful)

          by fitten ( 521191 )
          I haven't looked at the actual timings, but the vast majority of memory operations are on cache lines. So, you have to use some math to determine how fast a cache line is filled using each technology to see what the difference is. It isn't all about the time to get the first byte in, it's about getting the cache line in (which is 256 bits - 2x128-bit reads on our favorite x86 machines). DDR will still be a little faster, I'm guessing, but the initial read latency is amortized over the two reads in a dual

      • The new Opterons on the new socket architecture actually will have DDR2, it was just announced publicly a week ago or so.

    • Re:What about I/O? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by HaydnH ( 877214 )
      Sun always builds their systems to be balanced and avoid bottlenecks, it's the first thing you learn about on the internal training courses so needless to say the I/O is fast enough. [sun.com]

      Haydn.

    • Re:What about I/O? (Score:4, Informative)

      by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @09:16AM (#14025570)
      The 4 threads per core is designed exactly for that issue. If a thread is waiting for memory, execution can proceed on a different thread.

      • Ahhhhh, I find that parent very informative indeed. So this is really like 8 cores and quad level hyperthreading, where the first thread will be running 70%+ of the time, and the second thread will get scheduled when the first thread blocks, and run for 25% of the time, and the third thread will get scheduled when the first two are both blocked, and run for 4.8% of the time, and that fourth thread, well, 0.2% is all it gets. (And yes, I just pulled these numbers out of the air).

        Just out of curiousity, s

  • Dumb (Score:4, Funny)

    by pubjames ( 468013 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:58AM (#14025454)
    Dear Sun,

    RE: your statement:

    Removing the world's Web servers and replacing them with half the number of UltraSparc T1-based systems would have the same effect on carbon dioxide emissions as planting 1 million trees.

    Please engage brain before opening mouth.

    Thanks.

  • Comparisons to the cell? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:58AM (#14025455)
    These processors are a step in a different direction. Like the cell processor, they lack features like branch prediction, have small, very simple pipelines, etc. However, that isn't really all that bad, esp. on some tasks where your CPU is mostly just idling waiting for IO to finish anyway. I wonder if these "simple but gets the job done" CPUs will see an even wider market in the future. As the article said, they are cheaper and consume less power than their competitors

    • Re:Comparisons to the cell? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Quicksilver ( 41094 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @09:11AM (#14025536) Journal
      Not really the same thing at all. The cell uses one master to control several specialized units. Niagara is just what is sounds like. 8 cores on 1 piece of silicon. They all are the same and the all can run any Sparc code.... unlike the Cell which isn't compatible with anything and each unit can only work on what it is specialized in.
    • The Cell is an asynchronous SMP and the SunT1 is a synchronous SMP machine. The Cell processor has one master CPU with multiple "DSP" [wikipedia.org] chips or cores. The SunT1 has multiple CPU cores.

  • And... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Moby Cock ( 771358 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:59AM (#14025468) Homepage
    removing the world's Web servers and replacing them with half the number of UltraSparc T1-based systems would have the same effect on carbon dioxide emissions as planting 1 million trees

    "And it has the added benefit of lining my pocket."

  • Impractical (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 14, 2005 @09:00AM (#14025473)
    I don't know many people who have a server room large enough to hold a million trees.

    (twiddles thumbs for the remaining 17 seconds. Lahdy dahdy hum dum dum)

  • Massively multi-core x86s (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rbanffy ( 584143 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @09:07AM (#14025510) Homepage Journal
    AMD or VIA would build a cheap multi-core x86 based on VIA's or Geode cores... Sun could sell systems with them as developer boxes running Solaris 10.

    BTW, what would happen to performance if you started with a Geode core and spent the rest of your wafer-area budget with Itanic-size caches?

    For now, I have no hope to have one of these on my desktop anytime soon.

    • Re:Massively multi-core x86s (Score:5, Informative)

      by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis.gmail@com> on Monday November 14, 2005 @10:44AM (#14026367) Homepage
      Dude, a PPC 440 is 6mm^2 and consumes 700mW of power at 667Mhz. You could easily fit a dozen on a die the size of a P4 and still take FAR less than this Niagra core. At a rated 1200MIPS per core a die with eight of them would net you close to 9600MIPS max. Of course you'd need some form of L2 cache and high speed internal bus.

      Similar the new ARM cores Cortex [arm.com] it takes roughly the same power at 1Ghz which gives it apparently 2000MIPS. The area is about the same as PPC 440. So in theory you could hook 4-8 of these up as well and get a killer chip too..

      Point is Suns quotes of being "2 possibly 3 generations ahead" is totally bullshit. They're at most one generation ahead. It takes one multi-core ARM or PPC to totally destroy this.

      Tom
      • " At a rated 1200MIPS per core a die with eight of them would net you close to 9600MIPS max. Of course you'd need some form of L2 cache and high speed internal bus."

        Cache is not as small issue as you think. In most modern processors, 50%-75% of die is taken by cache alone. So do you math again taking half to quarter of die size.
        • Law of diminishing returns?

          Compare a 2MB L2 cache on a P4 to a box with 1MB of L2 or 512K ... the cache ends up contributing less and less to the overall performance.

          What is also important is associativity. If you have a low-assoc cache, meaning a given address has few places in the cache it could reside you end up wasting more space. That's why [iirc] the AMD processors have high associvity L2 caches. They make good use of the 512K available.

          At my previous job we built Gentoo distros on 128 and 256K sem

  • The lowdown (Score:5, Informative)

    by gtoomey ( 528943 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @09:07AM (#14025511)
    http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T1/specs. xml [sun.com]

    Since the story is devoid of content:
    - up to 8 cores, 4 threads per core
    - integrated RSA
    - 3MB L2 cache
    - 90nm process
    - 1.2 GHz

    • Since the story is devoid of content...

      No worries, since most of the comments here (excepting yours) have also been devoid of content.

  • Not appropriate for all types of workloads (Score:5, Insightful)

    by XNormal ( 8617 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @09:08AM (#14025524) Homepage
    You need at least a dozen concurrent threads or processes before you can make good use of this CPU's power. Certainly not a good idea for desktops. An excellent match for web servers. Other server-type workloads (e.g. database, file server) may need some tuning to make the best of this architecture.
    • I'm pretty sure Sun is aiming this at the J2EE space.
    • My workstation is running 72 threads, and top (prstat) says that seven of them are active while I'm browsing, sending email and watching a script on a remote machine run...

      Sounds like I could use 8 threads minumum, way more if I'm unit-testing a three-tier app.

      PID USERNAME SIZE RSS STATE PRI NICE TIME CPU PROCESS/NLWP
      1139 davecb 101M 87M run 49 0 0:04:58 4.6% mozilla-bin/6
      480 root 56M 44M sleep 49 0 0:03:39 2.1% Xsun/1
      700 davecb 15M 10M sleep 59 0 0:00:13 0.8% gnome-terminal/1
      692 davecb 9

    • You need at least a dozen concurrent threads or processes before you can make good use of this CPU's power. Certainly not a good idea for desktops.

      Not for the average Joe's desktop. But definitely a good developer workstation. Concurrent compiling... It might also be quite nice as a graphics workstation. If you have a threaded rendering application, this would also be nice.


    • What I'm thinking is VMWare-type virtualization.

      I recently was hired by the CS department at a major university, and they're looking into a way to replace the rows and rows of desktops in a cs lab with a fewer amount of servers, while at the same time, being able to give their students access to the entire OS. Getting one dedicated server per student wouldn't fly, but something like this running vmware, or a small cluster running usermode linux would allow for quite a few small virtual machines.

      I'm intrigu

  • The processor after this (Score:3, Funny)

    by Xerp ( 768138 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @09:11AM (#14025538) Journal
    Will obviously have the name "C1ala1s"

  • A new measure of CPU performance...the tree (T) (Score:5, Funny)

    by ip_freely_2000 ( 577249 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @09:12AM (#14025540)
    We can add this performance criteria to our system selection process...how many trees are saved. Featuring the Sun chip which is the world's first Megatree (MT) performer.

    Why I remember when I was a lad we had Kilotree performers, and we were glad for it!!!
    • They weren't talking about saving trees (since we don't get our electricity from wood-burning power plants), they were talking about saving CO2 emissions. Since trees absorb CO2, it's a measure of how many trees it would take to absorb the CO2 emitted by the burning of fuel sufficient to power the chips. So it's really more of a "Tree-Reduction Equivalency Estimate". In this case, one MegaTREE.

  • Misread Code Name (Score:5, Funny)

    by FJ ( 18034 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @09:17AM (#14025579)
    Am I the only one who read the code name as Viagra?

    I knew sun was having troubles but not THAT kind of trouble.
  • UltraSparc T1-based systems would have the same effect on carbon dioxide emissions as planting 1 million trees.

    Thats great but did they offset all the marketing bumf about this; Now that surely made large dent into those newly planted tree's - caching in before even planted some might say.

    There is also the factor of all the extra web/page hits and respective computer power and as such extra carbon dioxide ommisions related to that.

    So in the end to be truly green you would just release the product and keep s

  • Ultrasparc III Cores (Score:3, Interesting)

    by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @09:20AM (#14025589)

    The Niagara uses Ultrasparc III type cores which have limited single thread performance. This limits this design to certain applications that are highly concurrent in nature. More interesting is the Next Gen Rock CPU which will have highly parallel Rock CPUs.

  • It is not Niagra. Thank you
  • ...is it good at memory leakage? ^_^

    Or is it perhaps not as low-power as they clame: maybe it require a huuuge current? ^_^

    One should carefully name ones product. Its fate may stand or fall on it ^_^
    • As I'm responding to this, the ad box is running a Sun ad that states, "No wonder their name rhymes with Hell...". So I would conclude that Sun tends to pay attention to what the names rhyme with.

      Also, Sun is pressing the reliability aspect of their solutions. Therefore, I'm willing to bet that Sun is hoping people will connect "Niagra" with a rhyming word with the connotation "stays up a long time." I'm not quite sure what that word would be, however. :-)

      p.s. actually they seem to be using Niagara. Perhaps
  • Whoa, talk about "uptime".
  • s/n/v/
  • With this new processor Sun hopes to get a leg up on the competition.

    Oh, instead of the previous attempt to get a leg "up" on the competition with the "if you can't beat them, join them" method like: http://www.sun.com/x64/ [sun.com]

    Before anybody gets weird on me, I am not an AMD fanboy. I am kinda a Sun fanboy, but I have been very critical of them in recent years for a reason. They have been for years watering down their name and reputation. Hopefully this new chip is in the right direction. We will see. Ultr
  • Sun announced today, that they will be chopping down one tree for every new system sold!
  • ... who misread the topic "New Server Chip Niagara" as "New Super Cheap Viagra"?
    That would at least be an honest slashvertisments for a change.
  • I just noticed that a Sparc "Ultra 5" goes for $60 on eBay these days. What's the bang:buck ratio of a U5:$60 compared to the most economical of these new T1s? Because the right programming can get multiprocessing from a LAN of U5s, along with lots of redundancy (power, disk, memory, buses, etc) and even geographical distribution (disaster resilience). Maybe even for cheaper.
    • You also need to factor in the cost of replacing the disks in the U5s. Commodity PC disks will do.

      Those piece of crap Conners (rebadged as Seagates) that they shipped with have a high failure rate when used heavily. Not to mention that they are dog slow.

      I use U5s in my lab, they're cheap and binary-compatible with my production platforms. Their slowness is useful in finding bottlenecks early, however I still need to test on other platforms to identify multi-CPU issues.
      • BTW: you haven't gotten debian-sparc to run on your U5s, have you? My 3.1r0a netinst ISO gets to "Starting kernel...", then the VGA goes black (but stays on). Help welcomed...

        • You could try NetBSD instead: http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/sparc64/ [netbsd.org]. I'd recommend NetBSD 3.0, which has just gone from a beta to a release candidate, and includes support for all of the graphics cards found in Ultra workstations. A prebuilt release candidate can be found on the FTP mirrors under /pub/NetBSD-daily/

          • How good (complete) is the current NetBSD Linux binary compatibility? Because the reason for switching the U5 from Solaris to Debian is to use the same app codebase for all of my servers. I can replicate Debian directory structure with symlinks if necessary, but of course the apps need to find the Debian facilities in those directories, in addition to kernel API compatibility. Otherwise, I could just stick with (Open)Solaris.
  • ...applications then even a desktop machine will benefit from multiple cores.
  • So, just as how many VW Beetles can fill a Hectar, or whatever that was, now we're going to have a new slashdot metric -- i.e., how many trees your multicore CPU is worth?

    Or maybe it's how many trees can fit in a Beetle.. or How many CPUs in hectar?..

    Have I worn out this joke yet?

  • Good Chip; Bad Angle (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MidKnight ( 19766 ) on Monday November 14, 2005 @12:25PM (#14027366)

    Sun has been talking about this puppy for a while now, and it's good to seem them deliver it. It does round out their processor strategy pretty nicely: AMD on the low end, and if you want obscene performance per-CPU at the high end you get this guy. I'll be interested to see some performance numbers.

    Typical Sun though: crap-tacular marketing. What's the deal with the "eco-friendly" angle? See Sun's front page [sun.com]. Which CTO's actually care about that again? It's just stupid; saving the planet is a great corporate goal, but hopefully Sun is a bit more concerned with their bottom line, where they haven't consistently made a profit in 5 years.

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