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Sun Microsystems today complemented the release of two new servers
with some potentially significant changes to its processor architecture
licensing policy and the way in which Oracle will price its database
for the fresh gear.
We covered the Sun Fire T2000 and T1000 servers earlier today.
What's important about the boxes in the context of the licensing and
Oracle developments is their use of the eight-core UltraSPARC T1 - aka
Niagara - processor. This chip marks the most major development in
Sun's UltraSPARC line in a long, long time and gives it a part unlike
any other offered by Tier 1 competitors.
Sun Microsystems today complemented the release of two new servers
with some potentially significant changes to its processor architecture
licensing policy and the way in which Oracle will price its database
for the fresh gear.
We covered the Sun Fire T2000 and T1000 servers earlier today.
What's important about the boxes in the context of the licensing and
Oracle developments is their use of the eight-core UltraSPARC T1 - aka
Niagara - processor. This chip marks the most major development in
Sun's UltraSPARC line in a long, long time and gives it a part unlike
any other offered by Tier 1 competitors.
Sun has moved to "open source" the UltraSPARC T1's design in a bid
to generate outside interest around the chip. The exact details for
this plan remain a bit thin, but Sun did say it would publish the
specifications for "the source of the design expressed in Verilog, a
verification suite and simulation models, instruction set architecture
specification (UltraSPARC Architecture 2005) and a Solaris OS port" for
the UltraSPARC T1. In so doing, other companies could create versions
of the low-power chip to handle other software than the web and
application server loads Sun has aimed at with its new servers.
"You don't know where it's going to go," said Sun's CEO Scott
McNealy, during a product launch event in New York. "That's the beauty
of it."
(McNealy, an avid Register reader, gave our site a fine
plug during today's event. It's good to see he's not bitter about us
leaking all the UltraSPARC T1 system details early.)
Simon Phipps, one of Sun's most prolific bloggers, shed some more light on the chip licensing change, saying
"Verilog source code, tools and more behind the UltraSPARC T1 (the
"design point") will be released under an OSI-approved open source
license next year - OpenSPARC - and a community will hopefully be
forming to use that design point for any purpose that's interesting."
One could imagine some folks in Asia dabbling with Sun's new design,
although widespread interest in UltraSPARC T1 would seem to hinge on
more work being done to port other operating systems than Solaris to
the architecture. Sun noted it would welcome a Linux port. In the
product details for the chip on Sun's web site, you'll see that
UltraSPARC T1 is "hypervisor ready." This likely means that Sun has
some hypervisor plans in store for UltraSPARC T1 and that most ports
would be written to that software layer as opposed to the underlying
chip.
On the database front, Oracle continues to baffle customers with its bizarre fractional pricing scheme
to handle the emergence of multicore chips. On the mainstream dual-core
products available from Sun, IBM, Intel and AMD, Oracle requires
customers to multiply their total core count by .75 to figure out per
processor licensing costs. With the eight-core UltraSPARC T1, Oracle
has adopted a .25 model, so each of the new Sun servers will be priced
as if it were a two-way machine. That's quite a bonus for Sun and its
customers.
The Register labs team is busy working on an algorithm
to crack Oracle's multifaceted pricing scheme. This process involves a
substantial diorama investment coupled with a Googleplex-like Beowulf
cluster implementation and some clip art. We'll be at this for awhile,
as you can imagine.
Overall, it was great to see Sun return to its hardware roots and
demonstrate that it does make use of such large research and
development funds. The company's hardware pitches are much more
palatable than many of its far-reaching software efforts. Server sales
remain the key to a real Sun recovery, and it would seem that
UltraSPARC T1 can only help this process. ®
Read original article at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/06/sun_niagara_open
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