Replies to post #6795 on Intel Corp (INTC)

[subzero]

more good itanium news.


SuSE to bundle SGI servers
By Lisa M. Bowman
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
August 24, 2003, 9:00 PM PT
http://news.com.com/2100-1010-5067135.html

In an effort to broaden Linux's appeal, SuSE Linux will bundle its new SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 with SGI's Altix 3000 servers and superclusters.
The company plans to start shipping the bundled product in October, it said. The move expands SuSE's 64-bit products and paves the way for scaling Linux to 128 processors, the latest effort to turbo-charge the increasingly popular open-source operating system. SuSE and SGI said they would work together to develop a 128-processer version of Linux.

"SuSE shares SGI's vision of a broadly scalable and robust Linux environment for technical and scientific computing," Dave Parry, general manger of SGI's server and platform group, said.

Mountain View, Calif.-based SGI makes specialized computers for complicated graphics tasks, such as the creation of special effects for movies or the visualization of airflow in car design. Most of its systems use Irix, the company's version of Unix, in combination with MIPS processors. But earlier this year, SGI launched the Altix 3000, which is based on Linux and Intel Itanium processors.

A few weeks ago, SGI said it would ship a 128-bit Altix machine in the spring.

Both companies are aiming to expand their reach through the agreement. SGI gains a standardized version of Linux, which it hopes will attract more applications to its machines.

In a statement announcing the partnership, Oracle said it welcomed the deal because customers running its software on the SGI servers using SuSE's Linux would have access to Oracle's support for the operating system.

SuSE, for its part, gets another high-profile endorsement of its version of Linux and a commitment to further soup up the operating system. In June, Hewlett-Packard expanded its relationship with SuSE, announcing that customers could get SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 bundled with its ProLiant line machines, which mainly uses Intel's Xeon chips, or with its servers based on Itanium chips.

[Dan3]

Re: You cleverly left off the fact that the "current schedule" represents a 6 to 9 month slip from AMD's "prior schedule".

It's pretty clear that you've never had anything to do with R&D or high tech in general. When projects are first scoped out, early timelines project problems being solved easily, but they often aren't - that's why it's R&D and that's why the schedules are always off, if they already knew enough about it to make perfect schedules, it wouldn't be new technology.

If AMD is shipping in high volume by the end of the year, Athlon64 will be about 2 years later than the very earliest dates. That's not bad when compared to Itanium (which was a more complex project) that is about 4 to 6 years behind the very first plans.

Since some models of Opteron have now been shipping for several months, and the systems have been fine (and I know they are, since several of our Opteron servers have now been running for a couple of months), it's fair to say that things are looking pretty good for the Athlon 64 launch. The current Athlon64 is basically an Opteron 2XX with a different sticker on it, so AMD has a pretty good handle on how the launch will go. Given that support from motherboard and chipset makers has been strong, and the existing products have been rock solid, the Athlon 64 launch is looking pretty good.

The Opteron/Athlon64 program has been a spectacular success for AMD. To understand just how tremendous a job AMD has done, you need to consider that Itanium, which was not constrained by the need to maintain backwards compatability with anything, hardware or software (though it was complicated by the use of a different instruction set) has taken 2 to 3 times as long to bring to market at (at minimum) 20 times the cost.

The Opteron/Athlon64 is an incredible achievment and the markets are starting to pick up on that fact.