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Looking at UltraSPARC III
argonaut writes, "I saw a cool article about the UltraSPARC 3 at Ace's Hardware. They have some of the usual intro stuff about Sun in the beginning, but then get more in depth about the technical specs. The best part is the second page where they talk about ILP, pipelining, and scalability (up to 1000 cpus!). There are some excellent examples of ILP and load latency. "
Let me take it upon myself to defend Sun one line at a time from your complaints.
1) The CPU's are overpriced.
The CPU's are *MORE EXPENSIVE* yes, overpriced, no. Look at a comparison in the CPU's on just a very simple level. The CPU has 8 Megs of L2 Cache. Not 256k, not 512k, not 1 meg, 8 Megs. That Cache is running at CPU Speed. If there's anything at all that's slowing their speed down, its the large amounts of L2 Cache they run with their servers.
2) Motherboards are overpriced.
I honestly can't say I've ever priced a Sun Motherboard. There is no such animal.
3) Memory is overpriced.
Yes, yes it is. Buy Kingston.
4) The funky hot-swap PCI cards are overpriced.
First off, I'm Sun Hardware Certified, and I don't know of a single system in which you can hot-swap PCI cards. You can do this to drives and I/O Boards (on the Enterprise 3500+ systems), but not individual cards. Now getting back to PCI cards being overpriced, in Sun's specifications, it dictates that all hardware MUST have a PROM with the drivers on it to be certified as Sun Compatable. At boot time, all of the PROM's are polled and all of the drivers are loaded at the hardware level. Plug and play that really works, imagine that...
5) The OS is waaay overpriced.
Free, yeah way too expensive.
6) What does Sun do that Lintel cannot?
A lot of things. First, all of the workstations and servers have TRUE plug and play. There processors scale from Laptops (anyone remember Tadpoles) all the way up to Mainframe-sized computers (E10k). Also - hot-swappable I/O and CPU/Memory in the Enterprise systems. The E10K can scale up to 64 450 Meg processors with 8 megs of L2 Cache, 64 Gigs of Ram, and can run 4 Virtual Machines that can be dynmically allocated on the fly.
7) Even a Farm of Lintel boxes can be had for less than that sun.
Sometimes, true. If you had a farm of 386 Linux boxen, (~$5 apiece) will cost less than a fully loaded E10K (~$10,000,000). Realistically, the cost/performance is about 50/50. UltraPenguin is runs better IMHO than Alpha Linux or x86 Linux.
Don't make opinions without the data to back it up.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
So this is a 600 MHz RISC processor using .25 micron fabrication processes; that should be pretty fast. However, it consumes 75W power? AND the 750 MHz will consume an estimated 90W power (at .25 micron)?!?!
WOW! And people think that Intel chips (and Alphas) consume a lot of power! The heat dissipation of these puppies will be monsterous! If you had a dual CPU workstation with 2 600MHz US-3s, the CPUs alone would require (at most) 150W of power. What sort of power supply would that need? 300W+, right? I'd really rather not have one of these sitting under my desk, considering the fan noise from the power supply, case and CPU fans.
Why can't they use a smaller die size (which should reduce the power reqs and heat dissipation)? Is it just Sun's fabs, or is there some architechtural reason? Or are the power consumption specs they quote just OFF?
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Its all about how fast the system can service request and not how fast a single app runs. My Ultra10 at work is very responsive even under heavy load (Loads of > 1.0). Plus Sun machines are very balanced. You don't have the CPU waiting for the memory, disk, etc. Unlike PC's today where the CPU's are fast, but are hindered by ATA disks, high latency caches and memory
I've already started writing a 2nd article, this time on Sun's MAJC chips, which have lots of interesting features. Yummy. The reason why I'm doing a bit about Sun hardware is because (a) I tend to follow what they're up to because they do occationally do pretty interesting stuff, and (b) nobody else has written much...
Wish they weren't so secretive sometimes though. If you actually look at Sun's site, there's almost nothing about the US-3 technically. Still have to wait until Sun start actually selling US-3 hardware before can be certain of anything...