hedley's Journal: Cheap 64bit computing

Today it costs >100k$ for a large Sun machine with 64bit addressing and the ability to load 12Gb of physical ram. Next year, AMD and Intel will be introducing 64 bit server chips. The AMD offering (Sledgehammer, Opteron) will be the least pain in my opinion to get software going on it. Once that time comes, jobs that once used to be the domain of Sun/Solaris machines will become the work of cheaper farms of AMD/Intel based cpu's. The effect of this will be pronounced since companies that depend on simulations (IC companies for example) can afford to have more of what is usually a fairly tight resource. Sun will still enjoy it's large processor #, large memory capable machines but many tasks that once required that large iron will get migrated to these cheaper alternatives.

Hmm

[Com2Kid]

I always thought that the true power of Sun's computers was in the machines they make that count how many hundreds of gigabytes of RAM are installed, or how many tens of terabytes of Hard Drive space are accessible.

Ooooh, 72 hot swappable PCI ports, coooooollllll

(ok ok so I likely can not even understand what those types of machines are used for, but the numbers make me drool. :) )