Sun does Opteron can-can for French bank

Oh la la

By Ashlee Vance, 29th September 2004

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Just one week after wooing Wall Street, Sun Microsystems has secured a financial services win on the other side of The Pond.

France's BNP Paribas has picked up Sun's V20z Opteron-based servers for a new government compliance system as well a new risk-management analysis application for traders. Funny enough, the bank went very technical in its statement about the deal - seemingly taking a shot at Intel. "With Direct Connect Architecture, AMD helped remove the front-side bus bottleneck and directly connected the processors, the memory controller and the I/O, to improve overall system and performance efficiency," BNP said. Intel's Xeon chips have been derided by some as a type of old world architecture that creates memory bottlenecks unlike AMD's newish Opteron chips.

The bank shelled out for more than 100 of the dual-processor Sun Fire V20z servers, which will be linked in to a grid computing system. The idea is to have the boxes help BNP Paribas meet the Basle II risk management regulation.

Last week, Sun tried to convince US financial services companies to come back to it after a couple years of neglect. The financial sector often looks for the most compute power possible at the lowest cost and picked a number of Linux on Intel systems following the boom - at a time when Sun sold no such systems. These days Sun is trying to draw attention to its large fleet of Opteron-based gear. Sun and HP are the biggest backers of AMD's still fledgling chip. ®