Sun Gets First Dibs on New Opterons for Entry Workstation

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

There are benefits to being one of the dominant and most vocal supporters of the Opteron processor, and in the case of Sun Microsystems that means getting first dibs on the new socket 939 Opteron chips. To that end, Sun announced a new workstation using the chip this week at the JavaOne event in San Francisco. The machine, code-named "Marrakesh" and sold under the Ultra 20, is being aimed at developers.

The socket 939 Opterons, as we report elsewhere in this issue, are an implementation of the 64-bit Opteron chip that has one less pin, uses unbuffered main memory, and plugs into the same sockets as the 64-bit Athlon 64 processors do. Moving to unbuffered memory means that there is a slight increase in the chance of soft errors caused by radiation inside the workstation, but it also means that the workstation can use the same kind of inexpensive unbuffered main memory used in PCs rather than the expensive buffered kind used in servers. Unbuffered main memory also delivers higher bandwidth and is quicker to get data after a cache miss, which are things that workstation users are usually keen on.

The Ultra 20 comes in three flavors. The value edition has a single 1.8 GHz Opteron 100 processor (that's a 939 socket, not the normal 940 socket of the Opteron chips), 512 MB of 400 MHz DDR main memory, a PCI-based ATI RageXL graphics card, an 80 GB SATA disk drive, a DVD drive, and a three-year warranty for $895. This machine is targeted at educational institutions and developers with tight budgets. The mid-sized Ultra 20 configuration has a 2.2 GHz Opteron 100 chip, 1 GB of main memory, an nVidia Quadro NVS280 2D graphics card (PCI Express), plus the same disk, DVD, and warranty for $1,395. The high-end Ultra 20 boost the clock speed to 2.6 GHz, boosts memory to 2 GB, adds an nVidia Quadro FX1400 PCI Express graphics card, a 250 GB SATA drive, and dual DVD drives for $2,695. Because socket 939 machines only support four main memory slots and vendors can only produce 1 GB DDR 400 DIMMs, the main memory in the Ultra 20 maxes out at 4 GB right now. This high-end box is aimed at MCAD and EDA users. In addition to the PCI Express x16 slot for graphics, the workstation has two PCI Express x13 slots and four 33 MHz PCI slots (for legacy card support). The machines currently only support single-core, socket 939 Opteron 100 Series chips, but as soon as AMD can deliver dual-core versions of the chips, Sun will drop them into the Marrakesh workstations. Sun will be shipping the machines starting in July, and is offering financing terms that allow a developer to have one for under $30 a month.

All three configurations come with Sun's own Solaris 10 Unix operating system plus Sun's Studio, Studio Creator, and Studio Enterprise development tools included. Microsoft's Windows XP Professional as well as Red Hat's Linux WS 3 and 4 and Novell's SUSE Linux Professional 9 have also been certified on the Marrakesh workstation.

On the OCUS Windows-based technical computing benchmark for workstations, a Sun Ultra 20 had a rating of 614 in a configuration costing $2,695 using the 2.6 GHz Opteron 152 processor with the 939 socket. A workstation from Hewlett-Packard, the xw9300, using the Opteron 252 processors running at the same clock speed, had a rating of 624 (lower numbers are better), but the xw9300 has a list price of $4,839. A Dell P380 workstation using a 3.8 GHz Pentium 4 processor had a rating of 876 and cost $4,084. All three machines were using the FX1400 graphics card from nVidia and had 2 GB of main memory.

Of course, Dell and HP machines are not the only things that the new Ultra 20 will be. Sun's own entry-level Sparc-based workstations will also, by comparison, look expensive and slow. John Fowler, general manager of Sun Microsystems Inc's Network Systems Group--which also handles workstations these days--said that the Marrakesh workstation would offer lots of bang for the buck compared to its own Sparc-based workstations, and he obviously did not want to say by how much (and picking a Windows-based benchmark test was just one clever way of dodging the issue). But the truth is that many Sparc workstation users have applications that have not yet been ported to the X64 version of Solaris, and they are going to have to buy Sparc workstations until those applications are ported. Sun is working as fast as it can to make that happen, of course, and is hoping to steal a little business from Linux and Windows workstation vendors, too, as its software partners make the transition to Solaris on X64.