Sun Puts Intel Quad-Core Chips into Ultra Workstations

Published: October 25, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The company may have changed its stock ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA, and it may generate the bulk of its revenues from servers, but Sun Microsystems got its start as a workstation vendor and the company still wants to engineer powerful desktop machines that appeal to its installed base of Sparc/Solaris customers. And sometimes that means peddling the fastest X64 boxes that can be put in the field. Such is the case with the Ultra 24 workstation Sun announced this week.

The Ultra 24 is the result of Sun's partnership this year with Intel, the company that Sun used to spend a lot of time bashing and the rival of another one of its workstation partners, Advanced Micro Devices. Sun is already peddling workstations based on its UltraSparc-IIIi entry processors, which are known as the Ultra 25 and Ultra 45 machines, which have a single 1.34 GHz and two 1.6 GHz UltraSparc-IIIi processors, respectively. Sun has not shipped full-blown, single-core UItraSparc-III or dual-core UltraSparc-IV or UltraSparc-IV+ processors inside of workstations, which is a bit of a mystery considering the performance that these processors can pack. In the past couple of years, when Sun could have fielded more powerful Sparc-based workstations, it has instead offered Opteron-based machines. Specifically, that is the single-socket Ultra 20 workstation and the two-socket Ultra 40 M2, both of which use the dual-core Rev F Opteron processors announced in August 2006.

Incidentally, in theory, the Ultra 40 M2 workstation will be able to support the new quad-core "Barcelona" processor from AMD, but Brian Healy, group marketing manager of workstations at Sun, is mum on when this might happen. As was the case with the second-generation of X64-based "Galaxy" servers, Sun is highlighting its Xeon-based products first and then, presumably, will get back to sharing the limelight with AMD at a launch for new quad-core Opteron-based servers and workstations. AMD launched the Barcelona chips on September 10 (see AMD Gets Aggressive About Watts with Quad-Core Barcelonas for more on that), and said that the new processors were shipping for revenue back in August to OEM partners. Sun, which has been just this side of zealous about the Opterons in the past three years, has been surprisingly quiet on the subject since inking its partnership with Intel back in January.

The Ultra 24 workstation is a deskside tower box that is based on Intel's X38 Express chipset; it can support the Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, and Core 2 Extreme Quad processors from Intel. The Core 2 Duo chips are dual-core processors, and Sun is offering them in 2 GHz, 2.66 GHz, and 3 GHz speeds with 800 MHz, 1.1 GHz, and 1.3 GHz front side bus speeds, respectively. Customers who have workstation workloads that can handle more threads, and therefore can make use of more performance crammed into a single socket workstation like the Ultra 24, can also choose the Q6700 Core 2 Quad chip running at 2.66 GHz with a 1.1 GHz FSB or the QX6850 Core 2 Extreme Quad, which runs at 3 GHz with a 1.3 GHz FSB. The X38 chipset on the motherboard supports four DDR2 main memory slots, and the box is certified with 512 MB, 1 GB, and 2 GB DIMMs for a maximum of 8 GB. Sun has partnered with nVidia, AMD's rival in the graphics business after AMD acquired ATI in July 2006. Sun is supporting a basic 2D graphics card (the nVidia NVS 290), an entry 3D graphics card (FX 570), two more powerful 3D cards (the FX 1700 and FX 4600), and a top-end 3D card (FX5600) in the Ultra 24 workstation. The machine has a single Gigabit Ethernet port and supports four SATA drives from the motherboard and four SAS drives through a PCI Express adapter. The machine has four PCI Express slots: one x1, one x8 (with x4 electronics), and two x16s. The x16s support graphics cards like those from nVidia.

Like other workstations from Sun, the Ultra 24 comes equipped with Solaris 10 (the 8/07 Update) and the Sun Studio software development tools. The Systems Group at Sun has its own OEM agreement with Microsoft that will allow Sun to start preloading Windows Server 2003 and eventually Windows Server 2008 next year on the Galaxy server line, but the workstation part of Sun has to (for some silly reason) negotiate a separate OEM deal to preload Windows XP and Windows Vista on the Ultra workstations. That said, Windows XP Pro Service Pack 2 and higher, Windows Vista Ultimate, and Windows Server 2003 R2 and SP2 are certified to run on the Ultra 24 machine; so are Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client 5 and WS 4.5 and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and Enterprise Desktop 10. According to Healy, Canonical is working to certify its Ubuntu Linux on the box as well.

The next logical thing for Sun to do, it would seem, would be to put out an Ultra 44 that supports two-socket variants of Intel's quad-core Xeon 5300 chips. But according to Healy, Sun's workstation volumes are predominantly for single-socket boxes, owing mostly to the single-threaded nature of scientific and technical applications that tend to run on workstations; moreover, these applications tend to involve the heavy use of graphics, too, and in many cases, it makes more sense two have modest CPU power and two graphics cards (hence the dual graphics slots).

Now that Sun has decent floating point performance in the eight-core Sparc T2 processors, which run at 1.4 GHz, it might make sense to offer an Ultra 55 workstation based on the T2 chips and having multiple graphics cards as well. Sun is coy about how many workstation applications in the Solaris portfolio have been ported over to the X64 variant, but clearly there are a lot of customers with Sparc-native applications who want the kind of CPU and graphics muscle that the X64 products are getting, and no matter what Sun says, the UltraSparc-IIIi processors are getting long in the tooth. Of course, Sun could plunk a dual-core UltraSparc-IV+ chip inside a workstation, too, if it really wanted to give customers some processing oomph. But then the price of the workstation would probably be very high, and Core and Opteron machines would win out in the end anyway among the Solaris faithful.

The base Ultra 24 workstation with a Core 2 Duo chip running at 2 GHz, 512 MB of main memory, 250 GB of disk, and the nVidia NVS 290 graphics card costs $995. With a 3 GHz Core 2 Duo, 1 GB of memory, a 250 GB disk, and the midrange FX 1700 graphics card, the machine costs $1,835. With a 3 GHz Core 2 Quad Extreme, 2 GB of memory, a 250 GB disk, and the FX 1700 card, it costs $2,635.

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