Sun claims Opteron sales outpace Itanium
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SEQUENTIAL server revenue at Sun Microsystems has grown faster than the overall market, the firm claimed today. Citing a Gartner Dataquest report, Sun claimed that in the second calendar quarter of this year
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It&#39;s no longer Sun Microsystems and IBM working to undermine the Itanium processor. Both the chip&#39;s maker - Intel - and close software partner Microsoft are doing the dirty work now.
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Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ) said it broke even for the fiscal first quarter, topping analysts&#39; estimates.
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(InfoWorld) - After months of delays, Advanced Micro Devices' latest processor, a quad-core server chip calledÂ Barcelona, is at last expected to hit the marketÂ Monday. The stakes surrounding the release of Barcelona, officially called Quad-Core Opteron, are high. AMD lost ground in the server-chip market toÂ rival IntelÂ in recent quarters and is counting on the new processor to reverse its fortunes. That won't be easy. While AMD struggled to get the Quad-Core Opteron out of its factories,Â Intel shipped newer, faster processorsÂ expected to compete more closely with the new chip, particularly in the market for high-end servers with four or more processors. Nevertheless, AMD is counting on technical differences between its quad-core chips and those from Intel to offer better performance while consuming less power. Nine versions of theÂ Quad-Core OpteronÂ will be available from Monday, all manufactured using a 65nm process. These are the first quad-core chips from AMD and the first server chips from the company made using this technology. Previous server chips were made using a 90nm process. "We used this opportunity as we move from 90 nanometers (nm) to 65nm to redesign the processor, to be able to optimize and get more efficiency out of it," said John Fruehe, AMD's worldwide business development manager for servers and workstations. At the high end of the Quad-Core Opteron lineup are chips designed for servers with four or more processors. The 2GHz 8350 has a thermal design power (TDP) of 95 watts and is priced at $1,019 in 1,000-unit quantities, a standard measure of processor pricing. TDP does not indicate the amount of power that a processor consumes, rather it describes the maximum amount of heat that server makers must be able to dissipate from the chip in extreme circumstances. The second Quad-Core Opteron designed for multi-chip servers is the 8347, which runs at 1.9GHz and has a 95-watt TDP. The chip is priced at $786. The range of multi-chip servers also includes two models with a lower TDP, the 8347HE and 8346HE. With a TDP of 68 watts, these chips run at clock speeds of 1.9GHz and 1.8GHz, respectively. They are priced at $873 and $698. All of the Quad-Core Opteron chips have 512KB of level two cache per processor core, and 2MB of level three cache shared by the four cores. Five versions of the Quad-Core Opteron will be available for servers with one or two processors. The Quad-Core Opteron 2350 and 2347 run at speeds of 2GHz and 1.9GHz and have a TDP of 95 watts. The chips are priced at $389 and $316, respectively. The 1.9GHz 2347HE, 1.8GHz 2346HE, and 1.7GHz 2344HE have a lower TDP, at 68 watts. The chips will cost $377, $255, and $209. AMD said the new chips are faster than previous Opterons, with a 2GHz Quad-Core Opteron running 79 percent faster than a 3GHz dual-core Opteron. Five single-core Opteron processors are required to match the performance of a single Quad-Core Opteron, the company said. The Quad-Core Opteron has four processor cores on a silicon chip that also includes a memory controller hub and high-speed HyperTransport links. By comparison, Intel's quad-core processors have two dual-core silicon chips inside a multi-chip package that does not include the memory controller. AMD has added new features to the Quad-Core Opteron designed to boost the chip's performance and lower power consumption relative to earlier Opteron chips. For example, each of the Quad-Core Opteron's processors and the memory controller have independent power supplies, which allows them to run at different clock speeds and reduce power consumption when they don't need to run at full speed. "You're most likely going to have a quad-core processor with four different speeds because you've got four different utilization levels at any time," Fruehe said. The chip maker also added a 128-bit floating point unit to the Quad-Core Opteron to boost performance for certain types of applications. At the same time AMD will announce the availability of the Quad-Core Opteron, the company plans to say more than 50 systems based on the chips are now available from vendors like Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Dell, among others. If servers based on the Quad-Core Opteron chips turn out to be faster and more energy efficient than systems based on Intel's offerings, that edge may not last long. In November, Intel plans to refresh the bulk of its server chip lineup with a new family called Penryn. The Penryn server chips will be made using a 45-nm process and will have more memory cache than Intel's existing server chips, giving them a boost in performance. "We have a significant lead today and we believe we will have that lead with Clovertown, and once we have Harpertown with 45-nm we will extend that lead further," said Adesh Gupta, regional platform architecture manager at Intel Asia-Pacific's Server Platforms Group, referring to code names for Intel's current and upcoming quad-core processors designed for two-way servers. Later this year, AMD expects to release Quad-Core Opteron chips that run faster than the versions set to be announced Monday. One of those processors is a 2.3GHz Quad-Core Opteron SE designed for high-performance computers, set for release during the fourth quarter. AMD plans to offer faster versions of the standard Quad-Core Opteron chips during the fourth quarter, with faster versions of the low-power HE chips due during the fourth quarter of 2007 or the first quarter of 2008. Â
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After Intel CEO Paul Otellini bragged that Intel&#39;s Xeon chip was the most energy-efficient processor, Neal Nelson compared it to AMD&#39;s offering and found that Intel wasn&#39;t being exactly truthful.Recent tests by Neal Nelson &amp; Associates, an independent computer performance consulting firm, have reported that in 36 of the 57 cases tested an AMD Opteron-based server delivered better power efficiency than a comparably configured Intel Xeon-based server.The tests were performed on servers configured with 2, 4, 6 and 8 gigabytes of main memory at various transaction processing load levels. The results show that for certain configurations and at certain load levels the Intel Xeon based server was 2.4 to 11.7 percent more power efficient while in other cases the AMD Opteron based server was 9.2 to 23.1 percent more power efficient. In addition, when the systems were idle and waiting for transactions to process, the AMD server was 30.4 to 53.1 percent more power efficient.Power consumption while the servers are idle is particularly significant since many servers spend most of their time waiting for work. A November 16, 2006 press release from IBM quotes a report by the Robert Frances Group which states that on average servers in data centers are idle 80 to 85 percent of the time.The test results also showed that:-- Larger memory configurations deliver both higher throughput and better power efficiency;-- Intel&#39;s power efficiency advantages decrease as memory size increases;-- AMD&#39;s power efficiency advantages increase as memory size increases;-- For CPU-intensive workloads, the Xeon delivers 8.0 to 14.0 percent higher peak throughput;-- For primarily I/O intensive workloads the Opteron delivers 11.3 to 19.4 percent higher peak throughputNeal Nelson conducted these tests in response to a statement made by Intel CEO Paul Otellini in a July 18, 2007 analyst conference call. During that call Mr Otellini referred to Intel&#39;s &quot;lead in power efficiency&quot;. Neal Nelson decided to use his company&#39;s benchmark toolset to determine if Intel actually had a lead in power efficiency.In a somewhat dry comment, Neal Nelson said: &quot;It appears that Mr. Otellini&#39;s statement is inconsistent with the test results.&quot;The tests were not financed or sponsored by any company or group.Techworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.&#160;
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-PackardÂ is launching two servers using Intel's new dual-core Itanium chip in a bid to gain market traction for the troubled Itanium line. HP's Integrity rx3660 server, with a base price of $10,531, and rx6600 server, which starts at $14,771, will be introduced Thursday and feature Intel's Itanium 2 "Montecito" processor. IntelÂ introduced that processorÂ in July. HP is also offering a Montecito upgrade throughout its existing Integrity line. The industry is watching to see if Montecito will improve Itanium's competitive position against IBM's Power 5 chip architecture and Sun Microsystems' Sparc. It also remains to be seen how many server vendors beyond HP will embrace Itanium. "I would describe this as a marathon," said Don Jenkins, vice president of marketing for the Business Critical Server Division of HP, in Palo Alto, California. "It takes a long time to establish a new architecture in the market. It took IBM a long time to establish Power." HP introduced its first Itanium server in 2001. But by the end of 2005, servers based on the processor accounted for less than 1 percent of the market, based on units shipped, according to research firm Gartner, and 85 percent of them were sold by HP. But by another measure, Itanium is growing. Today, close to 9,000 software applications run on Itanium, said Jenkins, up from about 100 in 2003, which gives Integrity broader appeal to enterprise customers. "Customers can't use the server until they have the applications and the application vendors don't want to invest in the applications on that chip until they see the demand for it," he said. Several important software vendors also announced Thursday their support of Integrity running Montecito, including BEA Systems, RSA Security, and Comverse Technology. "HP has been steadily adding to the Itanium portfolio," said Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata. But few other server vendors are following HP's support of Itanium, Haff added. Fujitsu Ltd. announced in August it will introduce a server running Montecito, as did Silicon Graphics. But they are "small players" relative to vendors like Dell, Sun, and IBM, which are not using Itanium. Still, Haff said, Montecito "is a nice upgrade to the Itanium." Integrity is HP's high-end server for business-critical applications. Montecito is the first Itanium design to offer hyperthreading, virtualization and multiple cores, which increase Integrity's performance. The Integrity rx6600 running Montecito performs close to 350,000 transactions per minute (tmp), more than twice the 161,000 tmp of an Integrity running an older version of Itanium, according to tests by the independentÂ Transaction Processing Performance Council. Montecito is also more cost efficient, operating at $2.24 per transaction minute, versus $3.94 on a previous Itanium chip. But skepticism remains. "$2.24 is good but they're still not the most powerful system," said John Clabby, president of the IT research firm Clabby Analytics. "Montecito is an improvement, but it's not a leader and that's what Itanium was supposed to be." The fastest processor tested by TPC is an IBM Power 5. which topped 4 million transactions per minute a with a cost per minute of $2.97, noted Clabby. HP's Jenkins downplays the significance of IBM's performance numbers, noting that most enterprises only need servers that can perform 150,000 to 300,000 transactions per minute. "Four million is a benchmark that doesn't have any relevance other than bragging rights," Jenkins said.
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By Mark Boslet, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  Jun. 15--Intel ignited a new round of competition with Sun Microsystems and International Business Machines today by announcing plans to bring its most advanced chip-making technology to its Itanium line of business chips for the first time.
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SUN ANNOUNCED THE UltraSPARC IV+ this morning, most probably the last of its line. Sun will be taking a new direction from this point on, with the new Fujitsu co-developed chips being a definite step sideways
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(InfoWorld) - The server market remains strong but industry research shows unit shipment rates slowing as companies buy fewer, but more powerful, machines. The effects of virtualization, the emergence of multicore processing and other consolidation efforts are evident in server sales and market share numbers in IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker report for the third quarter, released Wednesday. A similar trend toward slower server unit sales growth is seen in a third quarter server report released Tuesday by Gartner Inc. IDC reports that overall server revenue grew by 3.5 percent from the year-earlier quarter to $12.9 billion, the fastest growth rate in four quarters. But IDC analyst Jed Scaramella points to slower unit sales growth, particularly for industry standard servers, as evidence of virtualization and other data center consolidation efforts by customers. "We have started to see unit shipment in the x86 market tempered a little bit," Scaramella said. Unit shipments of x86-based servers grew by 8.8 percent in the third quarter, down from 9.8 percent in the second quarter and 11 percent in the first. Virtualization is the process of enhancing server utilization by running multiple applications on the same physical server. Without it, some servers only operate at 15 percent to 20 percent of capacity. Companies are also buying new servers with dual-core or quad-core processors that offer more computing power than older models with single-core processors. Thus, customers can enhance their data centers' capability with fewer servers, Scaramella said. The IDC and Gartner numbers show no change in the market share rankings, based on revenue, of the leading server vendors. IBM Corp. led with 33.1 percent market share on a 6.6 percent revenue increase to $4.28 billion, compared to the year-earlier quarter. Hewlett-Packard Co. held onto second place with a 26.3 percent share as its revenue declined 2.1 percent to $3.4 billion. Dell Inc. holds a 10.5 percent share on a 3.8 percent revenue increase to $1.36 billion. Sun Microsystems Inc. followed closely with a 10 percent share on a healthy 15.8 percent jump to $1.3 billion. Scaramella says Sun has rebounded from weakness a year ago, when its sales fell by 5 percent. Since then, Sun has introduced its Niagara line of servers and servers running Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron processors, a rival to the dominant Intel Corp. processor. "Overall, Sun has been focused on performance per watt. They've been at the forefront of it," Scaramella said. Fujitsu Computer Systems Corp. ranked fifth with 5.3 percent market share on a 9 percent revenue decline to $690 million. The remaining vendors collectively held a 14.9 percent share on 4.4 percent revenue growth to $1.93 billion. Â
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Sun doesn't want to bring its Solaris operating sytem to Intel's Itanium chip. This week.
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InfoWorld - Advanced Micro Devices is undaunted by rival Intel&#8217;s recent headline-grabbing announcements of 45-nm (nanometer) processing technology and a deal to supply Xeon chips to Sun Microsystems.
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It's history, perched on a fence Analysis Vendors, vendors everywhere: Yep, all the major players turned up in Barcelona at the EMEA launch of AMD's so-called "native" quad-core Opteron processor chip. Well okay, nearly all.â¦
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Both HP and Sun claimed they were the worldwide leader in storage systems. Sun Microsystems announced that its Network Storage division took the leading position in UNIX disk storage systems factory revenue
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When Fully buffered DIMMs attack A recent benchmark comparing quad-core chips asserts that Intel Xeon-based servers have an edge in performance but are complete power hogs when compared to the dainty energy appetite of AMD Opteron-based servers.â¦
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Neal Nelson, who does independent benchmarking of server processors, said his latest tests show that servers based on AMD's Opteron processors consume less power than systems with Intel's Xeon chip do.
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HP and Sun&#39;s ongoing bitter battle for server market share is being played out against overall global sales of servers that have surged strongly to surpass $11.
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(InfoWorld) - AMD hopes to seize a larger share of the server chip market fromÂ its rival IntelÂ on Monday when it launches the Barcelona quad-core processor. AMD has been shipping the Quad-Core AMD Opteron chip to server vendors throughout August but will use its news conference in San Francisco to publicly announce those partnerships as well as prices and benchmark test results. The company plans to launch a 1.9GHz, 68-watt Barcelona chip that focuses on power efficiency, and a 2.0GHz, 95-watt version that focuses on price/performance, said Randy Allen, AMD's corporate vice president for the server and workstation division. In the fourth quarter, the company will follow that with a 2.3 GHz, 120-watt version for high-performance applications, and higher clock speeds for the first two chips. There is a lot at stake. After launching the original Opteron chip in 2003, the company enjoyed brisk demand as customers applauded the power-efficient performance of that 130-nanometer design process chip. But Intel soon got back in the fight as both companies built smaller, faster components, shrinking their chip scales to 90nm and adding a second core. AMD has endured disappointing results lately,Â posting losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars for recent quartersÂ and focusing its attention onÂ a merger with graphics chip maker ATI. At the same time, Intel claimed bragging rights to beating AMD to quad-core architecture andÂ 65nm scale chips with its ClovertownÂ server chip.Â Intel is also preparing to launch an even smaller-featured design in the fourth quarter with its 45nm Penryn chip. AMD says Barcelona is the answer to the Intel challenge. The chip is designed with all four cores on a single die as opposed to Intel's design of joining two dual-core Woodcrest Xeon chips, Allen said. Even more important, AMD upgraded each core from 64-bit floating point performance to 128-bit and retained its Direct Connect architecture and on-chip memory controller to avoid bottlenecks in data flow, he said. Thanks to that design, the new chip will provide better performance while using the same amount of power, he said. A customer could upgrade a Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL 385 server from AMD's dual-core to quad-core Opteron and gain faster operation with the same power and cooling demands. "Clovertown will look very anemic, especially as we bring out new frequencies. Customers really don't buy nanometers. What they care about is performance and benchmarking," said Allen. "That Direct Connect architecture is very helpful with virtualization, running multiple OSes, and other applications pulling more data than can be held in on-chip memory." Despite those advantages, AMD has missed out on a spike in market demand driven by a need to upgrade to servers capable of performing virtualization, one analyst said. "A lot of people view this as six months late or more," said Doug Freedman, managing director for research at American Technology Research. "Expectations got ahead of themselves, and some people viewed this as a potential savior for AMD after their server share topped out at the end of last year going up against Intel's dual-die quad-core. Now the feeling is this launch isn't robust enough in terms of samples shipped, design wins, and the complete food chain." To recover, AMD will have to quickly increase its production and release faster versions of Barcelona to improve the chip's availability for a range of applications, Freedman said. Intel executives say they are pressing the lead. "We are very confident, at least on the DP [dual processor] side, that we will have leadership across most of the benchmarks versus Barcelona," said Adesh Gupta, regional platform architecture manager at Intel Asia-Pacific's Server Platforms Group. "There are a small percentage of benchmarks which are floating-point based where we know that they have an advantage and that's an area which we will see them talk about a lot.... If you look at the broader spectrum of applications at the enterprise, we have a significant lead today, and we believe we will have that lead with Clovertown, and once we have Harpertown with 45nm we will extend that lead further," Gupta said. However, some vendors say there is room in the market for both chips. Each processor has its own strengths, said Dell CEO Michael Dell in remarks to financial analysts at the Citigroup Technology Conference in New York on Wednesday. Based on early tests, Dell said, a server using Barcelona chips is faster at running floating-point applications than a computer with Intel's Clovertown chips, but Clovertown is faster than Barcelona at running integer instructions. "So depending on the applications you run, or your theories of computer science, one of those servers may be the best for you. It is simply unacceptable for a company of Dell's size to have only one of those choices," Dell said.