Rumor: Oracle Kills AMD Opteron on Sun Iron
Oracle is abandoning AMD's Opteron processors, according to a person familiar with the company's server plans.
Source: The Register
The new owner of Sun Microsystems will not use the new Opteron 6100 and impending Opteron 4100 processors in future Sun Fire x64 servers, and all existing Opteron servers will be discontinued.
Thus ends an Opteron era that began with an impressive bang back in 2003 when IBM and then Sun enthusiastically embraced the Opteron because — at the time — Intel's 32-bit, frontside-bussed Xeons were just plain awful.
Oracle laid out a rough sketch of its server plans back in January, after closing the Sun Microsystems acquisition. But additional details have be scant.
In January, Charles Phillips, Oracle's co-president, said the company is not interested in being in the commodity x64 server racket. John Fowler — executive vice president of hardware engineering at Oracle who used to run the Systems Group at Sun — said that Oracle would focus x64 servers on enterprise-class products used in clusters. In other words — though Oracle never came right out and said this — the company was not going to have the plethora of different rack and blade machines in various shapes and sizes, but would streamline its products. This is understandable considering that Sun's volume approach had generated some revenues but probably lost Sun a fair amount of money.
Oracle has not been precise about exactly what it would do to streamline its x64 server lineup, but circumstantial evidence indicates that Oracle isn't exactly an enthusiastic x64 supporter. Sun was the most gung-ho of the Opteron server makers, but Oracle was quiet as a dead mouse when the twelve-core "Magny-Cours" Opteron 6100s and their related chipsets were announced by Advanced Micro Devices at the end of March. And it was equally quiet when Intel announced its six-core "Westmere-EP" Xeon 5600 chips two weeks earlier.
Source: The Register