There had been some rumors about processor upgrades for the midrange and high-end Sun Fire servers, which used the dual-core UltraSparc-IV processors, and Sun was possibly going to get its new Opteron-based machines out the door. It doesn’t look like either of these things will happen.
Considering that the star of the NC05Q1 show is OpenSolaris, which was pre-announced last week, the whole concept of these quarterly announcements seems to be falling apart a bit. If Sun does have server announcements in the works – and it had better if it knows what is good for it – they could come ahead of the next quarterly launch. Then again, Sun may sit tight with its product line again.
Sun had been expected to raise the curtain a little on its super-secret line of Opteron-based servers, which are being created by Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, who returned to the Sun in February 2004 when his company, Kealia, was snapped up, and Sun first committed to the Opteron as a core future technology.
Kealia was rumored to be working on a more sophisticated network computing platform than your standard rack-mounted server, perhaps blending server and storage functions in a slightly different way than we are used to in these machines.
Based on the problems companies are facing these days, such future Opteron machines could have a sophisticated blade server design with integrated storage arrays, plus with lots of server and storage virtualization features added on top of Solaris 10.
Right now, Sun’s Opteron-based Sun Fire V20z and V40z servers, two-way and four-way machines, are designed by Newisys, a unit of contract hardware manufacturer Sanmina-SCI. The dual-core Opterons due in the middle of this year from Advanced Micro Devices will plug into these boxes, making them four-way and eight-way machines as far as software is concerned.
John Fowler, general manager of Sun’s Network Systems Group, has said Sun will deliver a real eight-way machine this year, and with dual-core Opterons, it will be able to scale to 16-way processing. When Sun will get this machine out the door this year is unclear.
The one area where Sun is quietly upgrading its servers is in the entry Sun Fire V210 and V240 servers, which now have faster UltraSparc-IIIi processors. The UltraSparc-IIIi, or Jalapeno, processors are cut-down versions of the single-core Cheetah UltraSparc-III chip that Sun has offered across its enterprise server line for years, until the dual-core Jaguar UltraSparc-IV chip came along last summer.
The UltraSparc-IV chips run 1.2GHz currently and deliver about 80 to 85 percent more performance than a single core UltraSparc-III processor. We had heard that Sun would boost performance on these chips, and even if it can do it, it is apparently not going to do it right now.
Customers who want entry servers, however, will be able to buy more oomph for the dollar, or upgrade to slightly faster UltraSparc-IIIi processors. While Sun has cranked up the clock on the UltraSparc-IIIi to 1.6GHz, in its entry server line, it has only been selling these chips at 1GHz and 1.28GHz. But Sun’s online store is once again ahead of public relations, and there is a processor upgrade for the Sun Fire V210 and V240 servers, which are both two-way machines.
Sun is offering a 1.34GHz UltraSparc-IIIi in the V210, which is a 1U server that supports up to 8GB of main memory and two 73GB disks. A base machine with a single processor, 512MB of main memory, and a single disk costs $3,145 with Solaris 9 and the Java Enterprise System preinstalled and a free upgrade to Solaris 10. (A fully loaded V210 costs $8,845.)
The Sun Fire V240 is essentially the same machine, but with more expansion capability in its 2U form factor. The base V240 comes with a single 1.34GHz UltraSparc-IIIi, 512MB of memory, and a single disk for $3,695. Heavier configurations with two processors come with faster 1.5GHz UltraSparc-IIIi chips. With 2 GB of memory and two disks, a V240 costs $7,245; with 8 GB of memory, the same machine costs $11,295.
The 1.34GHz and 1.5GHz clock speeds are at the limits I expected Sun might attain on the UltraSparc-IV processors. But it looks like customers may have to get by with the 1.05GHz and 1.2GHz Jaguars until the Panther UltraSparc-IV+ kickers to the Jaguars come out some time in the middle of this year. (We also heard that there would not be a boost to the Jaguars from other people at Sun, and we reported that as well.)
The target clock speed of the Panthers is probably around 1.8GHz to 2GHz, but Sun has said in the past that the Panthers may debut at lower clock speeds, perhaps as low as 1.6GHz, because they are built using a brand-new 90 nanometer copper/low-k chip process from Texas Instruments that also adds strained silicon to shrink transistor sizes even further than that copper/low-k process would allow. Because it is a new process, yields may be low and clock speeds may be lower than the target range.
The Panther chip will have an on-chip L2 cache with a 2MB capacity, which should also help boost system performance considerably compared to the 16MB external L2 caches used in the Jaguar chips. Sun will also add an external, 32MB L3 cache with the Panthers, and will expand chip buffers, provide better branch prediction, and improve prefetch algorithms to further boost performance.
When you add it all up, Sun is expecting a Panther-based system to be able to do about twice as much work as a Jaguar-based system with 1.2GHz processors. So, pushing the clock speeds on the Panthers may not help the overall system performance all that much.
