Sun rolls out Shanghai servers

BIG TIN server vendor Sun Microsystems will update its rackmount and blade lines today with new systems built around AMD's latest quad-core Opteron processor called Shanghai.

Sun joins Cray, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM and others in jumping on the AMD Shanghai bandwagon.

Shanghai is AMD's first chip family built using a 45nm manufacturing process. AMD's new quad-core processor line supercedes its Barcelona chips that stumbled upon introduction, hurting Chimpzilla's competitiveness against Intel and contributing to market share and financial losses over the past year.

AMD's Shanghai processors are socket and pin-compatible with Barcelona and previous Opteron quad-cord processors, which means that system builders can turn out upgraded servers by updating the firmware and bunging in the newer chips.

Referring to the featured upgradability of AMD's quad-core processors, Arve Martin, a marketing manager for Sun's x86-64 systems, pointed out, "It provides some investment protection for our customers."

Sun's new AMD Opteron Shanghai servers include:

• Sun Blade X6440, a four-socket server that supports up to 32 DIMM slots. The listed starting price is $14,105.
• Sun Blade X6240, a two-socket server that supports up to 16 DIMM slots. From $3,850.
• Sun Fire X6400 M2, a server that can scale from two to eight sockets and supports up to 256GB of RAM. From $12,595.
• Sun Fire X4440, a four-socket server that supports up to 256GB of RAM. From $15,745.
• Sun Fire X4240, a two-socket server with 16 DIMM slots that supports up to 128GB of RAM. From $7,245.
• Sun Fire X4140, a one to two sockets server with 16 DIMM slots that supports up to 128GB of RAM. From $3,545.
• Sun Fire X2200 M2, a two-socket server with 8 DIMM slots that supports up to 64GB of RAM. From $1,895.

Sun plans to announce its next upgrades to its AMD x86-64 line of servers in January. µ