[geeks] Sun to adopt newest Intel Xeon chips for upcoming servers (link)

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 08:09:11AM +0000, Mark Benson wrote:

> That raises another interesting question, with ATi in bed with AMD  
> and Sun signed on the dotted line with NVIDIA, is this move towards  
> Intel an indication that AMD is looking like it's becoming a less  
> conducive environment for using non-ATi graphics hardware?

Probably not. ATI is a top notch hardware developer, but they lack
expertise in low power chips and comptency in sofware production.
If AMD can help them lower power requirments of their chips,
and assist them in getting their software production into gear, 
everyone wins.

The big difference between ATI and NVidia currently is that NVidia has
good support for other environments than Windows. Good documentation,
top notch Linux driver development and they assist open source
development effort.

ATI's support of Linux is weak at best, many people would say sucks.
Their documentation is poor, they try to avoid releasing as much data
as possible.

If Sun wants the really high end graphics capability in their systems 
without custom chips, they have to go with NVidia. ATI is not a 
good choice. In a few years, it may be very different. 

Geoff.

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