Sun Microsystems will continue to enhance and
develop its workstations with nVidia graphics
processors, the company said Tuesday.
The partnership extends the current relationship between the two
Silicon Valley-based firms to now include Solaris in addition to
supporting Sun’s Linux and Windows workstations. Financial terms of the
pact were not disclosed, but nVidia said it now has greater access to the
industry ecosystem needed to extend its reach with Sun products by its
side.
Sun also has relationships with ATI and Creative
Technology’s 3D Labs for its UltraSPARC-based workstations. nVidia’s
graphics processing units, or GPUs
workstations made by IBM, HP and SGI.
“Together, Sun and nVidia will target customers in graphics and
compute-intensive markets such as Oil & Gas, Life Sciences, Defense,
CAD/CAM, EDA, Financial Services, Professional Digital Content Creation
and Software Engineering,” the companies said in a statement.
The next step, according to the companies, is to tune and optimize
nVidia’s architecture with the OpenGL
Solaris on x86 and come up with an open, standards-based development
environment.
The fruits of the expanded relationship were revealed earlier this
summer, as Sun pared nVidia’s graphics hardware with the AMD Opteron and
Sun’s Java Workstations for its W1100z and W2100z workstations. Sun
currently offers a complement of nVidia chips for its Sun Java
Workstations, including NVidia’s Quadro FX 4000 for extreme 3D, the
Quadro FX 3000 for high-end 3D systems, the Quadro FX 1100 for mid-range
3D workstations all the way down to its entry-level 3D Quadro FX 500 and
its 2D professional grade Quadro NVS 280.
With 27.2GB/sec of memory bandwidth, nVidia said its Quadro FX
3000 would be a good fit for Sun workstations with its ultra-large
texture performance and high-resolution, 16X full-scene antialiasing.
Single-system “powerwall” support lets users digitally specify overlap
and blending for two images projected onto a large surface, even from
inexpensive projectors.
