c0t0d0s0.org

Nice comment about 80 core Intel at the register:

Terry Shannon will be turning in his grave. All X86 processors are really Alpha chips now. Pity it took AMD and Intel 10 years to catch up. And it seems DEC was quite right when it introduced the Alpha processor and said it would be good until the year 2025.

In my opinion, the Alphacide was the baddest thing that happened to the computer industry. The computing industry would look a whole different now with it.

PS: Now it´s up to Sun with Rock/Niagara/NiagaraII to bring some new concepts into computing.

Interesting article about a different perspective to the Suntel-Deal: The forces that forged the Suntel alliance:

So the SIs – the firms with both specific market knowledge and increasingly trusted brands – are becoming the front line for hardware and software vendors like Intel and Sun, because they are the companies that users turn to first.

In my personal opinion the x86 business has to be an business for system integrators or as an part of a project, because the low margins at 1 or 2 processor systems doesn´t let much room for presales. SI can cover the presales costs in bigger solutions but when you only sell the box, you must keep human work out of the equation as long as possible. As Intel has a huge influence to the SI ecosphere, it has a positive effect for Sun to have Intel in the boat for sure.

Interesting comment from Tom Yager in Don’t stick a fork in AMD:

Sun did not dump AMD; AMD will continue to supply Sun Microsystems with enterprise-grade x86 server CPUs. Sun found in Intel a cheap second source of supply for x86 microprocessors. There is a place in the market for a chipmaker that can jump the buzzword bar without actually meeting the requirements of the technology that the buzzword was meant to describe.

That´s it. The annoucement is to have an additional supplier - not to substitute a supplier - for a certain class of machines.

While reading Scientias good article about AMD Q4 earnings, i thought a little bit about the situation in the x86 market:

AMD touts the quad core K8L, Intel speaks about the 45 nm Core Duo, both tells the world that they are faster than the other. And both is correct for certain timeframes. Sounds familar. Yeah, it´s leapfrogging. When two architectures are rather similar (UltraSPARC and Power, AMD x64 or Intel x64) then the companies starts to play technical leapfrogging. At one point of time you lead the competition, at an different point of time it´s the competition.

Jonathan writes in his The world just changedblog about the real news:

Which is all to say, just when you thought you'd had the industry all figured out, good things happen - and although the coverage in the mainstream media seems focused on our adding Intel chips to our product line, I'd like to believe the real news is that Intel has agreed to add the Solaris operating system to theirs.

But the media seems to look more on the competion between AMD and Intel than to the real effects of this announcement. With the annoucement, we have partnership with both processor heavyweights. This can be only useful to push Solaris forward in the x86 sphere.

After some thoughts while sitting in an aircraft towards Dresden (yes, the customer not unrelated to announcement yesterday), i came to the conclusion, that the announcement yesterday evening can make it easier to sell AMD systems. Sounds counterintuitive, but there is a interesting effect in selling hardware: I call it the subterfuge effect. When there is a weakness in your portfolio, your argumentation is a subterfuge, when there is a strength your arguments are reasonable.

Nice example: Against a wide knows that TPC-C is not an indicator for system speed, it´s an function over the number of harddisks. When you have no or only an average TPC-C value, nobody believes you. Even when you explain it on bit level, many customers see this as an subterfuge. When you lead the TPC-C, the customer believes you, when you say: "TPC-C is utter bullshit". But obviously you wouldn´t do, as this would obliterate an selling point.

With AMD and Intel it´s the same. When you have only Intel or AMD, every argument for your point is only a subterfuge: "You say this, because you can´t sell us Intel". When you have both it´s a good advise.

So, the deal with Intel can actually help us to sell AMD systems.

Okay, the announcement it out. I think we get more out of the deal. We use Intel chips in some of our systems, and Intel admits finally that Solaris x86 is the best operating system for mission critical tasks. This will surely not the end of our AMD engagement. We are busy to integrate the Barcelona generation in our Galaxy line. And to be honest: As long Intel doesn´t stop to cripple their really good core with the mediocre front side bus i see no chance for Intel to gain an inch at servers beyond 2 processors. And K8L is an imminent next step.

The Intel Core architecture runs exeptionally well on certain workloads and i understand Jonathan to complete our portfolio there to close a gap. I think, John Fowler said it best in Sun and Intel scratch each other’s backs:

"Certain products will be similar [between Intel and AMD systems from Sun], such as DP rack servers, but others will be different. AMD is clearly better for high performance computing. We'll make it clear which is best for which kind of project," Fowler said.

A last comment:

in addition to working with Sun to get the Xeon above 8-way systems, he also said that he would like to see Sun bring Solaris to Intel's Itanium processor. Schwartz did not respond to the request.

Dear Intel, when you want Solaris on the Itanium: Port it yourself. The source is available

I mentioned it a few days ago, that many benchmark sites choose to run their benchmarks with an incapable operating system. The Inquirer wrote a nice article about different system concepts of QFX and Kentsfield and why the market will fall in favour of AMD´s concept of a Quad Core system. But at the end, it´s a question of workload which concept is better for you: Kentsfield, when you have a CPU bound workload, QFX when you have an everything-else-bound workload.

Scientia explains in his blog, why Tigerton isn´t a real threat to AMD K8L Quad. It´s an excellent article which descibes the problems of Intel. In my opinion, we will see severe benchmarketing. I´m sure, that some benchmarks can live with the constraints of Tigerton, but system performance on real life task will be severly hurt by the FSB-architecture. I strongly believe that AMD was the correct choice for Sun at the long run.

I want to introduce a new category in this blog: "Recommended Blogs". In a loose series i want to refer to blogs that i found especially interesting. The first blog in this series : Scientia´s Blog: A very insightful blog regarding x86 processor technology. But read yourself.

Irgendwie ist das ja schon dreist: Kupfern die 64-Bit-Erweiterung von AMD ab, und nennen das jetzt Intel 64.

Eins muss man Intel ja lassen. In Marketing sind sie gut. Löten 80 FPUs auf einem DIE zusammen und lösen keines der wirklich wichtigen Probleme (Organisation der Dies, wirkliche Cores) und wollen sich dann dafür feiern lassen. Gut das da der Register seinen Finger in diese Wunde legt:

Once Intel boffins have worked out the best way to interconnect cores, memory and other processing features such as specific protocol handles and maybe even graphics engines, they will have to determine how the whole thing can operate with real CPU cores instead of the test units.

Vielleicht sollte Intel mal etwas tun, wie Sun es mit Niagara gemacht hat. Einen paar Schritte zurück im einzelnen Core, um einen Prozessor zu bauen, der mehr als die Summe seiner Einzelteile ist. Also beispielweise eine Reihe von unveränderten Pentium Pro Cores auf einen Die giessen und diese dann geeignet miteinander verbinden. Dann hätte man auch eine Chance bei Intel in unter fünf jahren mit dem zu konkurrieren, was es bei Sun schon gibt (Niagara) oder in naher Zukunft geben wird (Niagara 2, Rock).

Digit Life reports in K8L Architecture on the 65nm SOI Process Technology in Quad-Core Processors Already in Q2 2007? about a speech from AMD. Okay, these Slides are AMD slides, but most objections on this slides can´t be easily dismissed as marketing bullshit. It´s worth a read. After all, i tend to look more positive for AMD into the future.

Interesting objections to the power consonsumption of an Woodcrest system: obscured woodcrest wattage. Beside of this: Using only half the memory is a "game" itself. I would like to see the power consumption with 32 Gigabytes.

It´s more and more obvious, that the memory is one of the largest position in the power needs of a computer system. I think, this is the next area where we have to design more efficent technologies. And with systems housing 1 TB and more worth of DRAM the problem gets worser.

Network Computing offers an insightful view into virtualization technologies in Chip Changes Propel Virtualization . An especially nice to see at the end of the feature:

See the Light: Sun is often overlooked as a source for virtualization, but since the release of its Solaris 10 for the x86 platform, the company has been quietly offering free virtualization in the form of Solaris Containers. Like partitions, Solaris Containers are multiple virtual instances of the Solaris host OS that require extremely low overhead.