Sun Says Performance Is Driving UltraSparc-IV Sales

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It has taken a while, but Sun Microsystems is ramping up the production on the dual-core "Jaguar" UltraSparc-IV and is delivering a substantial performance boost to its large installed base of UltraSparc-II and UltraSparc-III server customers. The delays in delivering the UltraSparc-III processors as the century turned has made Sun's loyal customers hungry for more speed, particularly compared with the performance boosts that IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Fujitsu-Siemens gave their Unix customers. The question now is, are these customers still hungry, and if so, is it for UltraSparc-IV?

They will soon have plenty of different Solaris foods to choose from. Sun has brought back cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim to create a new line of servers based on the Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processors, Sun shut down the future "Millennium" processor, which was the future UltraSparc-V chip until Sun killed it off a few weeks ago as it designated the future "Rock" massively multithreaded Sparc chip as the heir to the UltraSparc-V title. Sun is also working like crazy to bring back Solaris for X86, and will this fall deliver a bug-for-bug compatible version of Solaris that runs in 64-bit mode on Opteron and Sparc iron, and maybe even on Intel's future 64-bit-capable Xeon-64 processors. This is all very interesting, but the fact remains that many of the applications running in the Solaris base have not been recompiled to run on 32-bit X86 iron, and it will be some time before Sun can corral its independent software vendor partners to port their applications to 64-bit Solaris running on X86 chips from either AMD or Intel.

For most Solaris customers, what they really needed was less expensive Sparc servers with higher performance and better bang for the buck. The Jaguar chips and the new Enterprise 2900, 4900, 6900, 20000, and 25000 servers that use them are what customers need to support their growing workloads. The upgrade from the UltraSparc-III to the UltraSparc-IV chips, and from the new servers, is the least disruptive way (both technically and economically) of adding more capacity. And this is probably what a lot of Sun customers will do, even as they do think about future X86 iron. Those who can wait will wait, as they always do in the IT business.

Steve Campbell, vice president of marketing for midrange and high-end servers at Sun, says that the acceptance of the new UltraSparc-IV machines has been "good," and based solely on the tone of his voice, it would seem that Sun is probably at or slightly exceeding its plans for sales of the UltraSparc-IV machines. The new Jaguar chips were being rolled out in "staggered availability," which has nothing to do alcohol but means that Sun could not get enough parts running at 1.2 GHz to just let customers pick between chips running at 1.05 GHz and 1.2 GHz. Back in February, when the Jaguar chips were announced, we guessed that Sun would only put the 1.2 GHz version of the Jaguar chips into the largest Enterprise 2900 through 250000 server configurations (those with many processors installed and which Sun could charge a hefty premium for), and this is exactly what Sun did.

Campbell says that the 1.05 GHz version of the dual-core Jaguar is available in the new Enterprise server line, and that the 1.2 GHz parts will be available in these machines early in the next quarter, which is probably not as fast as Sun would like. Sun's own online store says that orders placed today (Wednesday) for Enterprise 2900 servers will take 23 business days to fulfill when they are equipped with the 1.2 GHz chips, which works out to June 14. That's two weeks before the end of Sun's fiscal year, and you can bet that the Sun sales reps and channel partners are trying to push as many boxes as they can before then. All of the other new servers say "call Sun" in referencing their availability, which begs the question: "Call Sun what?"

Sun will be making its next round of quarterly server and software announcements on June 1, and perhaps it will provide more clarity on when the faster Jaguar parts will come to market. But, in reality, a dual-core chip running at 1.05 GHz will have nearly twice the power per chip (but not per core, obviously) of the fastest UltraSparc-III processors Sun shipped. This is more bang than Sun customers have seen in about five years, so busting Sun's chops about the ramp up in delivering the 1.2 GHz chips is not exactly fair. When all Sun was peddling was single-core chips, it really needed the fastest chip possible. But going dual-core alleviates some of the pressure on Sun to crank up the clock, which is something that its fab partner Texas Instruments has struggled with as Sun's chips have become more complex.

"Performance for the UltraSparc-IV on real-world workloads is higher than anticipated for customers," says Campbell. He added that, on a recent SAP benchmark test, an Enterprise 20000 server with 36 dual-core UltraSparc-IV processors running at 1.2 GHz did about 1.85 times the work of a similarly configured box using 1.2 GHz UltraSparc-III processors with only one core per chip. (That old UltraSparc-III benchmark is not on the SAP site, but the new UltraSparc-IV test is.) He said that, on the Manugistics supply chain software benchmarks, performance on new Sparc iron was nearly twice that of the old iron.

One of the unintended consequences of such a big performance boost may be that customers cut back on the number of system boards as they upgrade from UltraSparc-III to UltraSparc-IV processors. Campbell said that this was an interesting possibility, and that indeed the average chip count in machines that Sun ships could go down, even as the core count goes up. He said that Sun needs a few more quarters of solid sales under its belt before it judges what customers will do. Whatever happens, all vendors, which are shifting to multiple core processors, are facing the same problem.

As for pegging the UltraSparc-IV demand, Campbell did a lot of weaving and bobbing to sound optimistic without being precise, which is what he is paid to do, like other people in the same position at other companies. "I'm extremely encouraged by the demand for the product," is all that he would say. When confronted with the idea that the cost of a unit of processing capacity has continued to go down apace after UltraSparc-III price cuts earlier in the year and the price/performance increases embodied in the UltraSparc-IV machines, he countered that what Sun was seeing was a higher average selling price on UltraSparc-IV machines as customers consolidate servers and make use of partitioning. This is something that will accelerate when Solaris 10 and its "software blade" partitions become available in the fall. In short, Sun believes it can sell this gear into its installed base, make some competitive wins, and make it up in volume. "We will be able to win more opportunity, and if we can gain market share and get higher average selling prices, then we should see an increase in midrange and enterprise server revenues."