But Wait, There's More

Red Hat, Wind River Systems Partner on Real-Time Linux

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat and real-time operating system maker Wind River Systems this week inked a partnership that will see the two collaborate on the creation of a version of embedded Linux that supports Wind River's VxWorks application development tools.

VxWorks is a proprietary operating used in real-time environments, such as in controllers and embedded systems. Several years ago, just as Linux was catching on, Wind River started supporting the open source FreeBSD variant of Unix with its VxWorks toolkit to give customers a choice of operating systems. Late last year, Wind River bit the bullet and said that it would offer support for both VxWorks and Linux for customers who wanted either. Wind River has plenty of real-time and embedded systems experience, but Red Hat, by virtue of its acquisition of Cygnus Solutions, an embedded Linux specialist, at the end of 1999, also has some skills. Linux has taken of in the embedded market, and Wind River wants to ride the Linux wave to make more money and expand into new markets.

Under the deal worked out between Red Hat and Wind River, the two companies will collaborate on engineering an implementation of Linux that can support the VxWorks toolset. Wind River will be the official sales channel for the resulting project, but presumably Red Hat gets a piece of the action or else it would not bother to form the partnership. Wind River is a well-established player in the real-time operating system market, and has the lion's share of the installed base. If Linux does take off in the RTOS space, then partnering with Wind River is a smart move for Red Hat. It is probably a good thing for the Linux environment, too. But most significantly, Wind River has seen revenue declines in 2002 and 2003, and wants to get back on the path to growth and profits. VxWorks, by the way, runs on X86, Sparc, PA-RISC, PowerPC, and a number of other RISC platforms.

HP Opteron Server Expected Today

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While the rumors have been circulating for weeks that Hewlett-Packard would announce that it was building or reselling servers based on Advanced Micro Devices' 64-bit Opteron processors, HP has not said it will or will not do it. Today, as we go to press, it might just go ahead and do it. Then again, it may not.

HP is making some server announcement today, and it does not have anything to do with the 64-bit extensions to the Xeon processor from Intel, which were announced last week at Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. HP said just about all that it was going to say about those extended Xeons last week, namely that it would put the processors, which support both 32-bit and 64-bit main memories, into its ProLiant server line. While the extra addressing support for Xeons is important for HP, other X86 server makers, and their customers, the extensions do not address the central problem that Opteron presents: a 2 GHz Opteron can match a 3 GHz Xeon in terms of performance on 32-bit X86 applications, and it can significantly outperform it on floating point jobs. The dollars per watt and dollars per flops of the Opteron is still compelling, particularly for high performance computing. Adding 64-bit extensions to both Opteron and Xeon does not change this fact.

That is probably the best reason to believe that today, Scott Stallard, senior vice president and general manager of HP's Enterprise Storage and Servers division, will very likely announce HP will support Opteron for two-way and maybe even four-way servers--certainly in rack-mounted machines, and maybe even in blade servers. They will probably not be marketed under the Integrity line, however, as has been rumored, but most likely alongside other non-Itanium machines.

If HP does not announce an Opteron line, everyone will surely be disappointed. However, there is always the outside possibility that HP is going to adopt IBM's Power chips or Sun Microsystems Sparcs. It may even buy Transmeta or VIA Technologies for all we know. But then again, snowballs usually melt in hell and donkeys usually don't fly.

Server Makers Swear Fealty to Intel's Xeon, Itanium Plans

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Three out of four is a pretty good average in most games, and so it is with Intel and the tier-one server vendors. Last week, at Intel Developer Forum, three of the top four server makers--Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and IBM--all took to the stage and with varying degrees of enthusiasm and lots of marketing speak endorsed both the future 64-bit enabled Xeon and the Itanium components that Intel will deliver over the next two years.

Sun Microsystems was not asked to take the stage with Mike Fister, general manager of Intel's Enterprise Platforms Group, presumably because it is not yet a high volume player in the X86 server market and because it has decided to use Opteron-based systems from Advanced Micro Devices as the basis of a new line of entry and midrange Unix and Linux servers.

Shane Robison, chief technology officer at HP, explained--as he has many times in the past several years--how the company was collapsing a disparate group of enterprise servers using 64-bit Alpha, PA-RISC, and MIPS processors to the Itanium line and will continue to push Pentium-based ProLiant servers, too.

HP executives representing both the Integrity and ProLiant lines said later at the show that the company was obviously pleased that 64-bit extensions would allow certain customers using two-way, four-way, and eight-way servers to worry less about memory use than has been possible in a restrictive 32-bit architecture.

Don Jenkins, vice president of marketing for HP's Business Critical Systems unit explained that because of the 32-bit memory limits, plenty of 32-bit applications running out there in the world have been tweaked to use processor cycles to compress data and shift pointers to boost the performance of those applications. With real 64-bit support and more registers, 32-bit applications can be tweaked to stop doing this and therefore gain back some CPU cycles that were lost doing memory tricks and also be able to handle larger data sets than was possible. Any new Windows or Linux applications that developers create will not have to worry about this, particularly since the Xeons will support a single 64-bit virtual address space, not the paged memory architecture of the 32-bit Xeons, which is itself a legacy of the 16-bit X86 era.

Susan Whitney, general manager of IBM's xSeries Intel-based server line, said Big Blue was excited by the 64-bit extensions and the company would be delivering extended Xeon blade servers for its BladeCenter machines as well as putting the new chips in its xSeries tower and rack servers.

With its eight-way and larger server business raking in the bucks, IBM is perhaps more relieved at the larger main memories than even HP when it comes to the Xeon line. IBM's Summit-II xSeries 445 servers support 16-way configurations today and will soon support 32-way processing. IBM is expected to go to 64-way processing sometime later this year. The only reasonable way IBM can deliver 32-way and 64-way Xeon-based servers is by having 64-bit main memory. With a 32-bit machine, there is a 64 GB upper limit on the size of shared main memory, no matter how many processors are in the box. A 32-way machine with only 64 GB of main memory is not balanced, and there is no way a 64-way machine with only 64 GB of main memory will work properly running the kinds of big applications and databases that IBM likes to sell top-end xSeries to support.

Whitney was careful, of course, to say the Itanium processor would still have a place at IBM and that its Summit chipsets had been engineered to support both Xeon and Itanium processors. Whether IBM pushes Itanium servers as hard as it might have otherwise had the 64-bit extensions not appeared in the upcoming Xeon, Xeon DP and Xeon MP server processors is a subject of debate. But from IBM's perspective, now the reach of Xeon has clearly been extended.

The people at Dell, which is aspiring to be the volume leader in the X86 server market and which still makes most of its shipments and money peddling uniprocessor and two-way servers, are very happy about the 64-bit support in the future Xeons and are, as has been the case for years, lukewarm when it comes to endorsing Itanium.

Kevin Kettler, chief technology officer at Dell, took the stage with Fister and had written his talking points on his fingers in ink, and it was significant, in a classicly Freudian way, that he wrote a reminder on his pinky to talk about Itanium as his last point--the last and smallest finger.

Dell was one of the early vendors to ship a four-way server using the first generation Merced Itanium processors, which were, to put it bluntly, a dud. Dell now sells a two-way Itanium 2 PowerEdge server that it peddles mostly in the high performance computing (HPC) market, where the kind of superior floating point performance that Itanium delivers compared to Xeon is more important than low cost, low power consumption, or compactness.

If scalability of SMP systems is a measure, then Itanium is clearly not as important to Dell as it is to either HP, which has two-way to 64-way Itanium machines, or IBM, which has two-way to 16-way machines. Kettler said there has been a lot of customer interest in the 64-bit extensions to Xeon, and the company is expected to stay consistent in its message that it is best to build large, flexible infrastructure to support Web, application, and databases by clustering two-way and four-way servers.

It is hard to say for sure, in the end, exactly what impact the 64-bit extensions for Xeon will actually have on the servers these vendors make and promote and the ones that customers buy. And none of these vendors--and indeed, the others like Fujitsu-Siemens, Unisys, and perhaps even Sun who will follow suit by announcing support for the 64-bit Xeons--will have much of an idea of what the impact of 64-bit Xeons will be until the Nocona two-way and Potomac four-way and larger processors get into systems and the operating systems and applications that run on them have been tweaked to support those extensions. It will be well into 2005 before all of this happens.

AMD Keeps the Heat on Intel with Low-Power Opterons

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Advanced Micro Devices announced last week that it was extending its 64-bit Opteron workstation and server chips with two new low-power variants. The Opteron HE processors consume around 55 watts of power and the Opteron EE processors consume about 30 watts of power. While this does not allow these chips to be used in fanless environments, this does make them appropriate in places where Intel is currently deploying its "Prestonia" Xeon DP processors, mainly in workstations, blade servers, and small form factor rack-mounted servers.

The Opteron HE and Opteron SE processors will be available in the middle of March, and the company says that they will offer the most oomph per watt in the X86 market. The Opteron 846 HE (2 GHz) and 840 EE (1.4 GHz) processors will sell for $1,514 each for 1,000-unit quantities. The Opteron 246 HE (2 GHz) and 240 EE (1.4 GHz) chips will cost $851 each in 1,000-unit quantities, while the Opteron 146 HE (2 GHz) and 140 EE (1.4 GHz) will cost $733 each for 1,000 units. As we go to press, AMD has still not explained how it has been able to lower the power consumption and heat dissipation of the new Opteron HE and EE chips, but it has probably either moved to a 90 nanometer fabrication process from the current 130 nanometer process used for the initial Opterons, cut out some of the cache memory for the chips, or done both at the same time for the lowest power profile versions.

These prices are at premium compared to the previous Opterons with the same numerical designations and clock speeds, which also had their prices slashed by between 7 and 51 percent last week as AMD tries to keep the heat on Intel in the battle for the hearts and minds of the server market.

Sun Brings Back Founder Bechtolsheim Through Kealia Acquisition

Sun Microsystems might be reselling a version of an Opteron server from either Newisys or Celestica to get the Sun Fire V20z out the door, but the company's acquisition of Kealia last week shows that over the long haul, Sun is undoubtedly going to be designing its own Opteron machines, which support Linux and Solaris.

Before Sun acquired Kealia last week, not much was known about the company, which was founded by Andreas Bechtolsheim, one of the four original founders of Sun along with Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, and Vinod Khosla. Bechtolsheim was in charge of Sun's technology between 1984 and 1995, and left just before Sun brought in a new set of techies through its acquisitions of Thinking Machines, Kendall Square, and a portion of Cray. Joy, who created the Berkeley Systems Design variant of Unix (which is at the heart of Solaris), left Sun late last year. With Bechtolsheim back, Sun is once again a serious technical contender in the workstation and server markets.

Bechtolsheim and some five dozen compatriots at Kealia were secretly working on Opteron designs for network devices and servers. Bechtolsheim founded a Gigabit Ethernet switch company called Granite Systems after leaving Sun in 1995, and a little more than a year later sold that company to Cisco Systems for $200 million. He stayed on at Cisco for a few years, but then got itchy and started Kealia in February 2001, which was rumored to be working on video server technology. No one knew anything else about Kealia except for its address in Palo Alto, California.

Well, now we know, and the joke is not on Sun, but on its competitors.