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Sun to use Intel chips in cooperative agreement

Published on January 22nd, 2007

intel racer and sun logo

The cooperative effort between Sun and Intel is interesting news, and demonstrates the (finally) growing need for more cooperation in the industry. I was going to make some kind of corny joke about Intel’s Sun rising, but decided against it.

The two computer giants on Monday unveiled a broad alliance that marries Sun’s Solaris Unix operating system with Intel’s Xeon processors. Under the pact, Intel will endorse Solaris as a mainstream OS and Unix platform of choice plus distribute OEM copies of Solaris. In exchange, Sun will develop and sell Xeon servers and optimize Solaris for Xeon and Intel’s upcoming 45-nanometer multicore processors, which will run multiple OSes on a single piece of silicon

The Sun-Intel pact will likely expand opportunities for Sun VAR partners that have been limited to UltraSPARC and AMD Opteron architectures, as well as would give Intel partners another OS option — in addition to Windows and Linux — to preload on industry-standard servers, Sun and Intel executives said.

Some interpreted the move as a sign of weakness on Sun’s part:

Sun Microsystems now realises that it stands to lose market share not only from Intel on Linux based servers but could face severe competition from AMD with its Opteron, a research analyst claimed today.

And that means it will have to carry on buying Intel Xeon chips, although the taste of that must cause a bitter taste in its corporate mouth.

One of the positive facets of convergence is that companies have to cooperate more closely to better provide the system integration and functionality customers have grown to take for granted.

Here’s a link to the release on the Sun Website.

4 users responded in " Sun to use Intel chips in cooperative agreement "

# 1 TJGeezer said, on January 22nd, 2007 at 5:14 pm

I wonder if it’s time to retire the old “Wintel” term. Seems you are taking this as more than just marketing window dressing. Something to do with the new, relatively low-power multi-core Intel CPUs, maybe?

# 2 Smartalix said, on January 22nd, 2007 at 5:39 pm

Exactly. Two of the biggest issues in server architecture today involve thermal management and power density.

# 3 pedro said, on January 22nd, 2007 at 10:55 pm

This makes the old RISC/ASIC discussion of old kinda pointless, doesn’t it?

# 4 noname said, on January 23rd, 2007 at 10:46 pm

Sun has a long way to go to regain it’s lost market dominance. It’s seems to has followed a trajectory similar to IBM Mainframes giving way to Digital mini-computers giving way to IBM PC on every desk. Along the way the internet exploded into the market and so did SUN servers and Cisco routers. Sun never really recovered after the internet bubble popped and IT spending falloff after the Y2k false alarm. There servers can’t command a premium they once did. A Niagara or Sparc chip alone cost as much as a premium top of the line PC, high-end server performance is expensive.

Maybe Intel chips can help them out in that regard.

Texas Instruments announced with it’s recent earnings it’s closing the Dallas 200mm Kfab by years end where the most advanced SUN chips where made and laying off 500 people, 1/2 that will be in TI R&D. TI may have finally managed to transfer the problematic process over to their 300mm plant. However, some people are suggesting SPARC is dying?

I am not sure what the advantages/issues of 1.4GHz eight-core and 64GB of memory support versions of Niagara (niche multi-threaded software workloads) vs. Intel Xeon and Intel’s upcoming 45-nanometer multicore processors.

Is there a good link out there that gives a good comparative study of their respective FSB, memory controllers?

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