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Sun's UltraSPARC III Processor Shipping
jzuska writes: "Sun Announced it's UltraSPARC III today. The link is here. 29 million transistors and 900MHZ, 9.6 Gigabyte/second processing bandwidth woohoo!!!" And this is an announcement of "volume shipments," not *coughcough* EventualWare. So lessee ... for boxes that you might reasonable put on your desk right now, there are how many architecture choices? (And how many of them run Windows?)
On a semi-related note, Sulka writes: "Motorola just introduced a new G4, the MPC7410. While this is a processor meant for embedded systems, it's essentially the same CPU as the G4 in Macs. What's significant is the price -- the 500 MHz version carries a $195 price tag. This is much cheaper than the Intel and AMD high-end offerings. I wonder how much the G4e is going to cost." Sounds like a cool basis for (awfully) high-end set-top devices at that price, but imagine what that will cost 12 months from now! Yoiks.
It's becoming more and more apparent that not all submitted news is being "read" as we would think. The whole point of the site is that we find out about news really quickly, right? So something submitted 23 days ago should have been posted, right? Look through all of the threats and check how many people submitted stuff that was rejected even though it's the same as the main post. Isn't this important?
Was down at the Level3 colocation here in Denver, when I bumped into a guy setting up some Enterprise 4500's. I mentioned to him how our E420R's would mysteriously/instantly reboot. Of course, this is last week, and both he and I knew of the problems Sun is having with their processor architecture, and how it is related to "garbage" getting in the cache. Of course, the point is that the UltraSparc III's share a lot in common with the UltraSparc II's, esp. the ones found in their E10K servers, and the ones found in the E420R's, etc. He mentioned that these next-gen chips were delayed _precisely_ because Sun was having so much trouble with their existing chips, and that they share a lot in common. Of course, this is just one sysadmin talking to another. But from the troubles I've had with the E420R's and E220R's, I'm much more inclined to believe him.
Sun claims they have top shelf equipment, and for the most part, they're right. But they should be ashamed of themselves for sitting a problem as big as this one has been (the whole Cache/corruption thing).
SGI's selling Intel boxes. My company was considering a lower-end MIPs chip for a (barely) embedded device for a while. Apparently we dropped that idea because we didn't know if we'd be able to get the chips.
There's no confidence in the Alpha -- every so often a story comes out that Compaq's going to kill it (eventually) or that Compaq and Samsung just invested another couple of hundred million in research. I'd be a hell of a lot more confident in it if Compaq would come out with a firm position on it. Alpha's got a lot of stuff going for it if you don't mind dropping $1500 for your processor (Last time I checked that was the going rate for a good one.)
I don't really know why PPC hasn't caught on. Maybe because it doesn't run Windows. It's all about marketing and no one's marketing PPC's. Well, Apple is, though most of their attempts at marketing seem to be geared toward suing people who are posting rumors.
*shrug* I'm not out to prove anything. This is all just the opinion of a guy who's been in the industry for over a decade.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Oops. I was dumb... I didn't read the headings on the table and and only looked at the INT table, thinking that the left column was integer and the right column was floating point.
My bad!
Disregard my last comment!!!!!
My point is that you can't tell a machine's usefullness simply by looking at how many clock cycles it spits out, or its supposed advantages in RISC architecture (and by the looks of things, this AC doesn't even know what RISC architecture would do for him -- he's just spouting out stats).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Uh....
In my new job, we use Sun computers. My observation is that they are amazingly slow (US==UltraSlow), have buggy compilers, and clunky GUI tools (which I don't use; I am in a 20 year time warp, back to vi and dbx)
It takes 2-4 hours to compile our CORBA library, depending on which machine I use. In contrast,
the cheap Win98 box I use as a X-client can compile that same library in 20 minutes. (In theory, if I used parallel compiles on our hugely expensive 8-way processor machine, the compile time would be comparable; too bad the compiler will crap out and generate corrupted files)
Not impressed.
Perhaps the best idea I have ever read on /.
Stefan
Rasputiin
From their website:
Does anybody have pricing yet?A.
Datasheet: Sun Blade 1000
Whitepaper: Sun Blade 1000
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Adam Sherman
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Adam Sherman
Freelance Geek
Yes, Sun seems to be a little bit boring at first, but I think this is exaclty what the industry wants. And no changing roadmaps twice a year. ;-)
Itanium: Probable winnerI agree, too. Not because the're good, but because the're from Intel.
Sledgehammer: Expected no-showWe will see. But I don't expect gread marketshare. Well, maybe, if AMD get's more industry support for their x86 stuff in the meantime.
Alpha: Dying, Also RanYes, Compaq seems to be quite happy with Intel chips, no make competition inhouse. ;-)
MIPS: Out of production, Also RanStill in production, but IMHO only with a vague future. SGI is bouncing from MIPS to Intel (NT and Linux workstations) and back to MIPS (Origin 3000). Looks for me like a looser in the last years.
HPPA: Possible contender if anyone knew about 'em. Nope. Intel developed the Itanium together with HP, and even if HP has extended its HP-HP roadmap, the future at HP is IA64. For example, the new SuperDome is already prepared for IA64.And if I really wanted to play around with large clusters of disks, I could mess around with software RAID in Linux, or even make a minor Beowulf cluster. My point is that speed is relative to the applications you are running, not determined by the raw numbers a PR spits out.
See the book "The Hardware Software Interface" for more information.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
First they were announced in 1997 to be released in mid 1998.
Then they were "on track" for volume shipments by the end of 1999.
Now they finally have some of them in products in late 2000.
Very impressive. Heck, weren't we supposed to have UltraSparc IV's by now?
[...]
Prevents your kid brother playing games on it
That's just blatantly not true. Doom works fine on my Sparc Linux box, and we used to have multiplayer doom games at a previous employer running Sparc/Solaris. Of course, it was a little unfair, 'coz the guy with the UltraSparc had a huge advantage over the rest of us (who were using sun4m machines). But I guess your kid brother probably isn't going to be interested in Doom any more, and AFAIK, Q3A and Unreal Tournament don't yet run on Sparc hardware.
As for comparing server performance, note that the original coment didn't explictly compare it to a PC. Much as I like Sun hardware, others (particularly IBM, and to an extent, Compaq) have been making some really nice PowerPC and Alpha boxen recently that gives Sun a run for its money in the price/performance game. Sun is heading towards being too expensive for what it does, but the strong brand name seems to make up for that in the market.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Sounds cool. One of the guys here at work had a translator that converted normal documents into jive, now that was hilarious :)
/. could be a forum for intelligent conversation, but until that happens, I can still get my fill of amusement out of the [flame-bait deleted] who haunt /.
I don't know about the author, but I always get a kick at the troll-biters. I really wish
-Space for rent
I fear that any IT administrators who obtain a system with this new processor may get power-drunk, and start cutting bandwidth to 16K/sec, forbidding users from contacting tech support, et cetera. Just a worst-case scenario.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Yes, Compaq seems to be quite happy with Intel chips, no make competition inhouse. ;-)
Come again? The Compaq sitting next to my Alpha has AMD inside. Compaq seems to have their eggs in plenty of baskets.
It doesn't matter if Suns aren't well suited for your use. They are amazing servers, and nobody really gives a shit if they run games or not. That's not what they're for.
So you like Athlons. Fine. I like RS/6000s. Fine. And RS/6000s don't exactly have a lot of games available. But the old 43Ps we had at work outserved the fancy shiny new NT boxes in every way. That's what they're for. So bug off.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
You don't know that.
What's the last game you saw running on Solaris?
I thought so. People don't play games on Solaris, they do actual work.
Nevertheless, have you tried compiling and running Quakeforge on a Sun Workstation?
Neither have I.
Therefore, you aren't qualified to make that statement.
TY & HAND.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Isn't also one a RISC design with the other is a um huh non-cracker design?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Yeah, that article was pretty cool. I'd like to see more like that, actually - going into depth about the Sparc architecture, especially on the new UltraSPARC III (and future chips).
Check www.spec.org; in short, Intel just got kicked into touch. A new US III 900MHz workstation is getting over twice the FP performance of a roughly equivalent Intel chip.
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It's not that much about an article being posted with your name... It's to see that today's "late breaking news" is something you've submitted a month ago and that was rejected... The posting of stories just looks totally incoherent sometimes.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
And a Compaq 8500 which takes up less rack space than and E450 Holds 8 faster CPU's 16GB of Memory and 11-64bit PCI hot pluggable slots, and onboard hardware raid. And it's a hell of a lot less expensive.
why are you so verbose and vague? Who would lend you a shoulder to cry if you are going to bore them with so many words.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
The problem with Sun hardware is that it's simply too expensive for what it does.
you mean it's too expensive for what you do? They're not aiming to sell it to desktop users and linux hobbyists, while power users (of whatever kind) want what Sun offer they'll still make money from their current price strategy.
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Please do not use this document as toilet tissue
Hardly, for about $3500 you can get an Ultra 5 with the SunPCI card (which is basically an AMD-K6-2 400Mhz) and loaded up with RAM. Sort of a hardware version of VMWare, except you have a single processor totally dedicated to your "virtual" machine.
I run NT in a window on top of Solaris at work -- works pretty good.
Course, for all that cash Id rather get a killer SMP linux box and just run VMWare, but hey, im not the one writing the check.
~dlb
http://cgi.eb ay.com/ aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=451336496
you can buy one of the first five of these machines, signed by "big daddy" scott m.
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blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
I just thought I'd make sure my post got the rating it deserved. I don't write that much to have my time wasted. And, I can't stand people spreading misinformation about what SUN boxes are good for. I program opengl for a living, and have an ultrasparc II in my office. Let me tell you what our experience has been. The PC is blowing everything out of the water. Even the 'high end' Onyx2's are starting to pale in comparison. Why? One word, Nvidia. You need to go study the Opengl pipeline a little bit more, boy. Opengl requires high memory bandwidth and low latency. That's why, for many (read, most) applications, an nvidia card with 460 mhz DDR memory and 50 billion flops of geometry processing power will be much faster than a $100,000 SGI box with only 100mhz of bandwidth to the memory. Think about it.... Believe me, we have an Onyx2 sitting in our computer room, that's the size of a small fridge, with 4 processors, and 2 rastermans, and my machine at home with the new nvidia quadro pro beta test board blows it away. The machine at home has an 800 mhz Athlon, BTW. Our application is a 3D Virtual world application, it uses quite a few polygons, enough to give the Onyx2 a hard time, but my PC at home is doing just fine. In order to build a comparable Onyx2 configuration (if it's possible) one would have to spend 10's of thousands of dollars. I don't believe that it's possible, there is too much latency in multi-processor architectures, the more CPU's you add, the more likely you will have bus congestion or have to wait for some data from another CPU before you can render the frame. For pure number crunching apps like RC5, that's fine, but for a real-time app like 3D graphics, that bandwidth is crucial, and the cards on the SUN's just don't have it. In the world of graphics, sometimes smaller, specialized processors will beat out ultra expensive boxes with tons of processors on board. And I'm really unsure of what you mean by 'professional' OpenGL performance. Please come up with a professional app that runs faster on a sun than on a modern PC with a good graphics card. I know that ours certainly doesn't. It's not even close. Don't get me wrong, SUN's make great servers, but I would never recommend them for opengl. Again, this is assuming that we're talking about real-time performance. Not setting up renderfarms for movies. Obviously, in the latter case, setting up lots of boxes in parallel is faster.
I was wondering the same thing myself, so I checked the spec benchmarks. Turns out that Sun UltraSPARC II is about the same speed on SPECint as Intel at the same clock speed (even about 10% slower). However, it is about 80% faster on SPECfp. Too bad it is stuck at 450MHz while both Intel and AMD already have 1GHz+ (ehh, ok ok one of them does ;-). Check out spec.org for more details.
UltraSPARC III looks like a major improvement. We'll see how it stacks up against competition. My guess is at 900MHz it should kick major ass.
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Thankyou!, I couldn't agree more. I doubt these people spouting off about SUN opengl performance have even used one. OTOH, I have one in my office, and the opengl performance is less than stellar to say the least. Please read my other reply for more info. It's http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/09/27/14262 07&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread &pid=107#294
I think that for 99.9% of the people the question is not:
"And how many of them run Windows?"
but:
"And how many of them run Word?"
The athlon 450 doesn't exist. Find a clue.
Thanks for the info.... it is just a irk that Sun would do this.... when their sales people initially told us about the USIII, the said it would be backwards compatable but their press release seems to say otherwise. I hope your info is right. Thanks again.
I don't drink because I have to, I drink to stop the voices in my head!
Good point. I'd agree with that statement.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Don't get me wrong, the Athlon is a great chip.
But a Sun UltraSparc 60 running 360Mhz machine completes a setiathome packet in four hours. An Athlon 450 "faster" machine completes the same packet in 20 hours.
Which is faster? (Hint 4
Slash is written in perl. Those "else if"s should be "elsif"s and {}s should be used around all the conditional code.
All those are covered by the Specs benchmarks, with the exception of power consumption. But power consumption isn't important when you consider the class of machines that these processors sit inside of, as well as the facilities where those machines are generally installed. Climate controlled, sometimes. Other times, not, but they're serving hundreds if not thousands of clients, so the electric bill isn't all that important if the servers happen to use 20 times the power as the desktops.
But again, one to one comparisons don't do you or them any justice. You can compare a 1 CPU UltraSPARC III based machine against a 1 CPU AMD Athlon machine, but that's again, not where these machines shine. Try 16 CPU's. Try 32 CPU's. Try 64 CPU's.
Intel archeticture just doesn't allow for the same scalability as Sun's...
So rather than look at SpecINT and SpecFP scores, you might rather look at SpecINT rate and SpecFP rate scores to get a grasp on their performance and scalability.
I just had a horrible idea.
Why should Apple fight turf wars with Intel? Wouldn't it be nice if Sun invited Apple to port a version of Aqua to this new killer chip to run on top of Solaris.
Can you imagine this chip on corporate desk tops? (Not Apple's market so no threat to the consumer base.)
Just a thought.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I think that should be here
According to the SPEC numbers,
900Mhz US-III is about the same as 750Mhz Alpha-21264A or 1Ghz Pentium-III with Rambus in OREGON-840 motherboard on Integer point.
On floating point, 900Mhz US-III is about 90% of the 750Mhz Alpha-21264A and 130% of the 1Ghz Pentium-III with Rambus in OREGON-840 motherboard.
WARNING: I used Base numbers; if using the Peak ones, Intel bites the dust even more.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Actually Sun produces a two PCI card set with a AMD processor for running Windown on Workstations. They're not cheap tho :(
- Sig
I submitted that very same article and it was rejected.
Let me get this straight... you have doubts about the viability of Alpha and MIPS, both of which pioneered RISC computing but you include IA-64 and Sledgehammer, one of which is struggling to get to market and the other that doesn't exist yet.
(yawn) Bring me real news, please.
-rev
Praise whichever Bruce Perens is your favorite, instead of always dwelling on negativity.
AC, you have hit on an important philosophical point.
It is perhaps symptomatic of our Western monotheistic culture that we believe there can only be one Bruce Perens. As a result, we create many warring factions -- each convinced that their's is the "true" Bruce Perens.
The truth, of course, is that ALL of these groups are right. Bruce Perens is all-encompassing. He is what we want Him to be. We may think we believe in different Bruces but in reality, your Bruce and my Bruce are the same Bruce. Who am I to say that your Bruce Perens is not the true Bruce? Have I actually talked to Bruce? Of course not. I think I have, but I have no proof. The Bruce Perens on Technocrat and the Bruce Perens with a dot on Slashdot are equally worthy.
The ultimate truth is that Bruce Perens is all of us and we are all Bruce Perens. And remember: In the future, everyone will be Bruce Perens for 15 minutes.
Will the real Bruce Perens please stand up? Perhaps He already is, AC. Perhaps he already is.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
PA-RISC port is called hppa
Looks like one fast mother. And a good toaster too! Anyone know how HP's Superdome (heavy iron) will compete if Sun puts UltraIII's on their heavy boxes?
That, and is there any good, clean web page with side-by-side SpecInt and SpecFP numbers? Spec's website is tough...
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
While it's great that Motorola is offering chips, I'm not sure about the prices. The more the merrier. In the mean time, you can get these:
AMD K6-2 500MHz, $46 http://www.pricewatch.com/1/3/1946-1.htm
AMD Durron 600, $46 http://www.pricewatch.com/1/3/2471-1.htm
AMD Athalon 500, $65 http://www.pricewatch.com/1/3/1920-1.htm
Intel Celeron 500, $78 http://www.pricewatch.com/1/3/1940-1.htm
Intel Pentium III 500, $111 http://www.pricewatch.com/1/3/1687-1.htm
I don't know a thing about the price of moto motherboards.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'd be willing to wager that my Athlon 1000 mhz, 768 MB RAM, 40 GB HD desktop machine running Windows 2000 would blow this thing out of the water...
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
That may be, but Linux just can't cut it in the database world. Until 2.4 is stable, then we won't have scaleable SMP or asynch I/O, both of which are critical for a proper database system.
And is Sun kit is so overpriced, why is Sun selling it faster than it can make it?
For anyone interested in reading some other news and viewpoints on the announcement, check out articles in VNU net, PC World and Cnet.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
Come now, the UltraSparc volumes would make intel and amd roll over laughing.
...
True, but then Sun hardware's all about quality not quantity. Although I don't think they'd mind selling SparcStations at PC volumes
Chris
I clicked the link and this is what netscape had to say about it:
Your browser sent a message this server could not understand.
D'ohhhh!
Wheeeee
> Remind me when was the last time you've seen ANY version of Windows running on Solaris? (and no, I'm not talking about Soft Windows - although I'm not sure if it was for Solaris, and I'm not talking about WABI either)..
So um, did you know that both of those are operating systems? If you're not talking about SoftWindows, what *do* you mean? Windows running on the, uh, Solaris CPU architecture or something?
Windows doesn't run on FreeBSD or MacOS either...
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
> For example, can Intel hardware currently run 200-prosessor SMP-systems?
Sequent seems to think so. Been doing that for many years now. Not that you run that many processors in a SMP configuration, but I'll assume you use that term for any MP setup.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
In the 280r web site, they mention that the III has extensions for accelerated Java processing.
Anyone know the details? Did do something cool like embed the picoJava technology, or is it just something boring (ala MMX) that speeds up JIT compiling?
Now how much did you say that mobo cost? Ironically, I could only find Intel mobos on the Motorola ATX page . Nothing showed up on pricewatch. 11,700 matches for G4 Motherboard on google, barf, I give up.
Help me out, I'm as interested as the next guy in cheap computers.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If you look at the TPC or similar test, you'll see that most of the cost for the setup is the storage, followed by the cost of software.
;-)
Actually, workstation performance depends on the floating point whether server one depends on the throughput and bandwidth.
So, if you want to edit documents in Word, get an Intel, otherwise get something that solves the problem the best.
BTW, Buick sucks, and Lexus sucks too (I have Nissan 300zx Turbo
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
... moderated it down ???
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
The worst part about this is after spending millions of dollars on E10K's, E3K's, and Ultra 250's, they announce that the new chip is not backwards hardware compatible. How long do you think it will be until Sun decides to ship new proc boards for the E3K and above or are they going to milk out what they can eith the current hardware then foce a new platform on you to use the new chips. So, here someone sites with their brand new spanking E10K Starfire with 32 procs that they spent 1.5 mil on and they are going to wait for new proc boards before upgrading or worse yet, Sun releases an E10500 with the new USIII's. I hate nothing more than forced proprietary hardware migration. Well.... okay... I hate Microsoft more.
Just my 2 cents.I don't drink because I have to, I drink to stop the voices in my head!
While HP has not published Spec2k numbers yet, it is doing quite well with the PA 8600 and the upcoming 8700 thank you.
Check again.
HP 9000 Model N4000 552 MHz PA-RISC 8600
SPECintbase2000: 367 (equivalent to a P3-800)
SPECfpbase2000: 338 (barely better than a P3-1000)
As for the 8700, what I said was not, "HP is dead meat," but rather "HP desperately needs to release a new processor"--namely the 8700. Unfortunately, they are not expected to do so for another year or so, in the second half of 2001. And when they do it will be little more than a process shrink of the 8600, itself just a critical path tweak of the 8500, a process shrink of the 8200, which was a tweak of the now 5 year-old PA-RISC 8000. In other words, the 8700 will be no more a new processor than was the Coppermine P3 (a process shrink and reworking of the Katmai P3, itself a tweak of the Deschutes P2, which was a process shrink of the Katmai P2, which was a tweak of the original P2, which was a process shrink and relayout of the 6 year-old PPro). Worse yet, all indications are that the 8800 and 8900 will be yet more tweaks and shrinks, rather than new cores. Don't get me wrong--the PA-8x00 has turned out to be a great core. But diverting most of their chip engineers over to help Intel with IA-64 looks like a bad move on HP's part these days. Maybe in a year and a half McKinley will change our minds, though.
SPECfp2000 results are available for the UltraSparc-III 900 MHz. It scored a 482. Pretty damn quick, especially when you consider that its score is more than 50% higher than the Pentium-III 933 Mhz, which got a 305.
Wrong comparison. First off, the proper score to be using is SPECfp_base, not SPECfp_peak. In case you didn't know, while recently some pretty ridiculous SPEC optimizations have been sneaking into the compilers used for SPEC_base, they are at least optimizations included in the standard compilers; SPEC_peak numbers include optimizations which would break any other code, and thus are not considered widely applicable.
Second, you clearly ought to be comparing the US3-900 to the P3-1000. Yes, the GHz P3 was unavailable for 6 months after it was supposedly "launched", but it is available now, or at least as available as the US3-900. Plus, the P3-933 numbers you quoted were hobbled by the horrible i820 chipset (yes, the i840 is only used for high-end workstations, but that's the market we're talking about here, right), and were obtained using an older version of Intel's Fortran compilers. Now, many people have complained that Intel's new compilers are so good as to call into question the usefulness of the SPEC_base benchmarks, since successive versions of the compiler have shown remarkable improvement in SPEC scores on otherwise identical computers. Still, they meet SPEC's rules for base scores, and everyone optimizes their compilers for SPEC, and most importantly the SPEC tests seek to benchmark not CPUs but entire platforms, and the compiler is an extremely important part of any platform.
Thus, the numbers you should have quoted are:
SPECfp_base:
US-III@900: 427
P-III@1000: 327
Looks a lot less impressive, doesn't it. Especially when you consider the fact that any chip with an ISA less than 20 years old ought to beat the pants off x87 in SPECfp, due to x87's crippling 8-register stack-based FPU implementation. Once the x86 chips finally phase out x87 in favor of SSE2 (coming with Intel's P4 and later with AMD's K8 "Hammer" family), they will finally have a decent platform for double-precision fp, and their SPEC_fp scores should rise accordingly.
In any case, considering the US-3 is destined primarily for the server market, the more important SPEC benchmark is not SPECfp but rather SPECint. Let's check those scores, shall we...
SPECint_base:
US-III@900: 438
P-III@1000: 438
Ouch.
Of course, the real strength of Sun's UltraSparc line is its tremendous scalability. Yes, you're overpaying for a 1-way Sun system, or even 2- or 4-way, but what you're paying for is the headroom to later buy a 64-way machine without having to completely switch your architecture. Fine. Considering the poor scalability of x86 and Compaq's awful support of the Alpha platform, it's completely understandable that IT departments continue to overpay for Sun boxes. Intel's flubbing of IA-64 thus far has given Sun a 3 year reprieve, and it'll be another year and a half before a real IA-64 CPU (McKinley) shows up on the scene.
Still, don't try arguing that Sun can compete with anything (except HP, which desperately needs to release a new processor) on straight price/performance. The US-3 closes the gap quite a bit from the extraordinarily outdated US-2, but not all the way. Sun's done a decent job squeezing performance out of an in-order design, but when Intel releases the SPEC scores for the P4 5 weeks from now they're going to make it (and indeed everything else) look extremely bad.
PROVE MY POINT!
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Hmm, I forgot to include that hppa is now supported under linux and should be ready for general use in the near future (6-12 mos.)
As a long term user of Sun workstations there are certain things that I feel is lacking. Correction there is one thing! Fast 3D graphics card for my sunbox.
I hear you guys say - but why? I'll tell you why. On the good old days we all used Sgi with Onyx and Indigo and everyone was happy. Then times changed something moved to PC's and all unix software migrated to one single plattform - Sun. Now here is the problem. As part of our strategy for the future the map component embedded in our Unix apps is going to be extended to 3D. And it runs like SHIT on Sun whereas like a dream on a PC. I haven't tested the newest card from Sun but I should assume they're still far far behind. Allmost all our new apps will from next year incoorporate this component - needless to say we need fast graphics.
What do we do? We can't wait. So we're stuck with bad performance.
I'm quit certain Sun workstations could have fast graphicsfast graphics if Sun just got it of someone else and just wrote a driver or something. (feel free to oppose me on that last one)
Conclusion - We just have to live with it but it stinks!
I thought OpenStep on Solaris was killed because it's goals were too similar to Java's, and of course Java was Invented Here, and OpenStep was Not.
As for "easier migration path to non-sun hardware", isn't that exactly what Java gives you? I think Sun is playing this smart in a Microsoft-dominated world and realizes that cross-platform technology is actually a easy migration path to Sun hardware, as long as they keep the hardware enticing.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I'm sorry, it's a queue, not a stack, but thanks for playing.
I really doubt the articles are processed in the order they arrived. It looks more like a FIMO (First In Maybe Out) to me.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Just moderate anything down that speaks out against how lame Slashdot is... Censorship? Sellout? You be the judge!
Don't forget about the PowerPC port of NT 3.51! I went to a joint Microsoft/IBM/Motorola(sp?) presentation where they were trying to convince people to port their apps to it. I still have the demo CD they handed out with demo apps ported to it. It pretty much dissapeared after that.
Basically, as soon as a company stops paying a large chunk of the cost for non-Intel ports, Microsoft stops producing them (although I think they were doing the MIPS port on their own).
Simple answer: it doesn't
The SPARC III processor is FAR faster (don't look the the Mhz!), have more cache, faster bus - so it's WAY above what Intel or AMD has to offer..
Ofcourse - on quantities of shipping - thats a totally different stories. I guess it's something like for every single processor that Sun sells - Intel sells at least 100 if not more.
But then again - Sun is targetting to the high end segment (ofcourse, they'll happy to sell you an Ultra machine as a workstation - which will costs you twice what you pay for an X86 machine)
Hetz (Heunique)
Someone please tell me this is a troll, I haven't gotten this close to falling asleep reading since Derrida.
Where does anyone claim that /.'s reason is "true reason", or that "every word that leaves its mouth is teeming with useful information", look in the official /. FAQ:
Question: I Slashdot the one and only true reason/enlightenment? Does every word that leaves its mouth teem with useful information?
Answer: NO! Only lamers are allowed to post stories to Slashdot.
I think its great that Sun spends a lot of time and puts out some quality hardware. It's rare to hear Sun coming out with a new chip, but it seems like Intel or AMD are putting out chips every other week. I guess its an entirely different market though.
It would be nice to see Sun produce mobo's for the new chip that support standard PC hardware. So you can build your own system type stuff instead of buying packaged Sun systems that cost an arm and a let.
Goodness knows i'd be a little annoyed (and only a little) if after going to the little (and only a little) effort of coming back to slashdot and submitting it first that another user got chosen.
From the titles i'm not sure whether this guy posted this link though. It seems to be generic sparc stuff rather than anything concrete about sparc's shipping.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Total of 24 processors activated (19149.62 BogoMIPS).
Seems to me that if Sun plays its cards right, it could minimize both those factors and make a play for the market today, catching AMD and Intel both with their pants around their ankles. As Microsoft demonstrates, once you have market share, you can pretty much write your own check -- they basically gave their shit away for a while there and look at where they are now.
Sun seems like the only other contender in the 64 bit market currently -- MIPs is gone and every few months there's another rumor that Compaq's going to terminate the Alpha line. That leaves Sparc, Itanium and Sledgehammer. I'm feeling like I missed one or two, but I'm drawing a blank. Anyway, the playing field is wide open! Who takes it! Whose processor reigns supreme?!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Remind me when was the last time you've seen ANY version of Windows running on Solaris? (and no, I'm not talking about Soft Windows - although I'm not sure if it was for Solaris, and I'm not talking about WABI either)..
Why the hell a person would like to run Windows software on Sun SPARC based machine? for Office 2000? Outlook?
Hetz (Heunique)
What page generates this postmodern tripe?
Alpha 21264 has four times the FP and twice the integer. Twice the speed of Intel FP isn't really an achievement when you're competing against a stack based floating point architecture. What's depressing is that the UltraSparc isn't any faster at integer. Out of order execution would have helped. Every other superscalar architecture supports it.
Here's the details about this chip...
Now lets see here... The 9.6GB/s is *only* cache coherency. Addresses, not data. So I wonder how they're inflating this number? As a line address is sent out on this bus, I bet they are counting the entire line size.
The cache BW is only 4.8 GB/s, and off chip is just 2.4GB/s. I'm not impressed. IBM has has been shipping machines with more than that for years. Heck, even Intel is going to catch Sun soon. S/390 G5 and G6 off chip BW is over 3GB/s. Infact, they're developing a machine available soon with 40GB/s data BW to the cache, and these caches are huge (like +128KB) low latency L1's, not the whimpy ones Sun is shipping (gee, notice they don't talk about the size?). Size matters. S/390 is the real choice for serious enterprise computing. And remember, IBM supports Linux across the entire line, from your wristwatch up to the biggest and baddest boxes in the world...
"a powerful and unexpected ally..."
Anyone care to guess when an ATX mobo (single, dual or quad) will show up on pricewatch?
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Yeah, Alphas are the likely competition for this crowd. Intel and AMD offerings have made a lot of advances, and the price is always great because of economies of scale, but for real workstations they still aren't real competitive. The Alpha, on the other hand, can stand toe to toe with SPARC and win. There are still reasons to buy Sun, of course, but only if you are talking about a really big box, say over 16 processors, running Solaris, not Linux. Linux performs a lot better than Solaris on uniprocessor boxes, but those 100 processor monster servers are better handled by Solaris still - that's what it's designed for.
And they are cheaper, best I can tell. About 3k sounds right for a base config - where do you see Suns cheaper than that? DCG is AFAIK one of the cheapest sources for SUN or Alpha hardware, their DCG L-1 with 128MB SDRAM 15.2GB storage, 600 Mhz Alpha, 2 MB Cache and all the other junk you expect on a Workstation (fast graphics, cdrom, NIC, etc.) sells for $3,850. Their Sun line starts at $3,595, with 9GB storage, a wimpier vidcard, and a 366mhz processor.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
If NVidia produces fantastic boards thats great for them.
But they could, and probably should release boards for the UltraSPARC III arcitechture.
The processors are much better for calculations and openGL than Intel -processors.
According to this page, the 750 MHz models have a maximum power dissipation of 70W. While it does have the ability to reduce the clock speed by 1/2 to 1/32 for EnergyStar compliance, you're still looking at a possible max power consumption of 560W.
Better hold off on that fantasy until we perfect a portable micro-fusion reactor.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
While you no doubt are right in many respects, I would like to challenge your statement on one end: reliability. Having been working in an almost exclusive Sparc/Solaris-shop, which then (due to the costs of hardware) graduately moved towards an Intel/Solaris-platform, I have also seen the maintenance costs and the downtime increase. When purchasing (almost) top-of-the-line server-hardware based on the Intel/PC-architecture, then the reliability may come close to that of Sun/Sparc. But then again, so does the price.
For regular office and lab workstations, reliability might not be too much of an issue for most (after all, a lot of people aer used to 3-4 reboots/day from whatever other OS they are running at home). However in a tightly administrated setup, where ordinary users have no privileges to reboot machines, Sun/Sparc-hardware does have its advantage over Intel/PC-equivalents. Sure, it costs more - but so does network administrators.
Now, for me - at home - I have an old Sparc Classic. Equipped with an extra netcard and some large SCSI-disks and a dat-drive, it makes for a decent file-server and acts as a filtering router between my local network and that of my upstream. The machine, while old - even ancient by todays terms - has no problems dealing with the at times rather intensive IO-load it is subject to. This due to the (then) innovative S-bus and crossbar-switch, which was default in Sun-gear (at at time when the ISA bus was the hottest in PC's). Even today, Sun's larger machines (creator, enterprise) are equiped with the same io-architecture, making them well suited for io-intensive tasks. IMHO, the IO-architecture of most Intel-based systems I have seen is no match for that of the Sun's.
Of course, Sun has released PC's also (Ultra 5, Ultra 10) which are little but a PC with a non-intel-compatible CPU but with all the defects of the PC-architecture (the PCI-bus, to name one such defect). Choosing between such a Sun Ultra 5 (f.eks.) and a Pentium-III-based PC wouldn't be too hard....
-- "Life is a bitch - and she hates me..."
You don't know what you're talking about. The first three items are already true for the E10k. Absolutely nothing new (unless #2 extends to their middle range servers). The GUI? Sun has always given the GUI/CLI option. Don't know if this'll stick around or not. About the frame relay thing... if it *is* _required_, I'm with you. Don't want it.
Definately a troll. I'm mobidly curious about who modded it as 'insightfull.' Either he used a real account, and just wanted to make the post stand out, someone just gave it a point for being so long. (Yet more evidence that /. moderation is broken. Oh well)
As for his vocabulary, either this was generated by some poor dialog generator, or this guy knows the words but not the defenitions. I don't claim to know all of them myself, but I did recognize most of them, especially the ones that he totally blew. (And I was excited for a minute that this might be an intelligent post... I think he just typed a bunch of gibberish occasionally and let the spell checker make a word out of it...)
Anyway, I'd better get back to work, I was just hoping that the same moderator would give me an insightfull for this comment too. I'd like to buy a lottery ticket tonight, and I want to build up a bunch of karma first.
-Space for rent
560 watts... A wafer should be able to cook my pizza, heat the toaster, run the central heating, and keep the grill running. All in *cough* software. :)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yes, that old boss would just love to have the biggest most expensive toy in the world on his desk so he could upload his palm pilot data, write papers, and other things any old 486 could handle. Well, OK, so long as he needs tech support, I'll keep on smiling.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
NT was meant to be extremely portable (unlike Windows 3.x, which was tied to dos and x86).
Sun bought the license from Microsoft in the early 90's, but hasn't released it. Anybody know why? Sun makes their money on the hardware, not on Solaris. I guess they want to "tie" their hardware with their software. What if Fujitsu, a sparc clone maker, wanted to sell NT?
Tips and Tricks for Mozilla
It is an irk, but an understandable and forgivable one.
If you look at the Intel platform, they change the packaging too, so that you don't have an upgrade path.
US-I and US-II were in the same packaging since 1995; IIRC, Sun changes the packaging in every odd-numbered version of their chip. This time they needed it in order to increase the bandwidth.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
But, there ARE Sun clones available. Fujitsu and another vendor I forgot the name make Sun clones.
If you measure the transactions per second on a high end dual CPU linux / BSD system
Though we sun may have 'reliable' hardware that has uptimes of years, I have a mail server running RH 6.0 that has about a 1 year uptime on it. (I know I should be patching kernel, etc.. but it's running fine for what it does..).
I have web servers that stay up and running for 90-180 days without so much as a hickup
If you buy good linux supported hardware, you shouldn't have any abnormal problems with faulty junk. (But if you buy cheep garbage, of course you will have problems...)
As for point of failure, I would be my server farm any day on a pack of 5 linux boxen that have proper failover than 1 monster sun behemoth.
To make it simple, sun sells enterprise solutions with an enterprise pricetag. Most corporations could get along fine with something that commodity hardware and linux, but corps seem to be funny that way and love to spend their enterprise budgets.
As to me and my company, we are quite happy with our sun-free environment. With large disk support comming and improved raw-io to disk, the database argument will not be really there.
IA64 will change things as well.
£.02
--------------------
The problem with Sun hardware is that it's simply too expensive for what it does.
Let's see. Sun hardware does the following:
Runs reliably for years.
Doesn't suffer the incompatability problems of cheap PC parts
Keeps the room warm
Costs a lot
Prevents your kid brother playing games on it
And (most importantly) looks good
You're right when you say that PC's can perform most tasks a Sun workstation can do, but I've yet to see a PC come close to a Sun server for performance, scalability or reliability.
Chris
although off-topic for this bit of news, this
thread is important - this is why I stopped
submitting articles - after submitting several
items and seeing them appear a week or two later
from someone else, I decided it wasn't worth my
time
before this is written off as whining, consider
that the overall effect is to discourage
submissions, reducing the usefulness of \.
of course, I must be a masochist, since this post
itself is most likely a complete waste of time,
since it will do nothing to improve the situation
NTAGARA
Replying to myself, I've got ES40 on the brain, but I guess that the DS20 would have been a more valid comparison.
ever heard of sarcasm??????????
no? okidoke... no worries...
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
Let's hope Sun has fixed the recent memory cache (or should I say crash) probl ems affecting their recent Ultrasparc-II processors in this new generation. Thankfully they replaced the faulty CPU modules if confronted with it.
Will it run embeded linux?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Read the post: "it's a wonder that we old-timers stick around". Most of us *do* leave; I'm still pondering why I haven't yet. Loyalty, maybe?
Hoping that some Anonymous Coward will rise from our ranks and use the power of Slashdot to light our darkest hour, till all are one?
However, judging from your post, it won't be you. The one-line questions are okay, but you need a little more style, a little more flair. I like a good three-paragraph flame much better. But we'll work on it.
Will the real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up
Mmmm... Must have one of these. I'm about to switch to a new employer, I wonder if I can get them to order one and have it there for me by the time I start?
Seriously though, these are some damned fine CPUs. Given that most Intel based servers are in the 600-800 mHz range right now, it looks like Sun will be staying competitive for a good while (Not that Sun doesn't sell out 100% of what they can produce now!). Hopefully Sun can keep these things moving forward to compete with Sledgehammer and Itanium *snicker* and not end up taking so long to move out the next architecture once these things start to look slow (Not that the current Sun batch really was slow to begin with, but Sun's 450 mHz VS. an Intel 750 mHz for a tenth the cost doesn't impress management...).
You perhaps forgot that the UltraSPARC III is scalable up to 200-processors, and has twice the floating point performance of an equally clocked AMD or Intel -chip.
Let us put an UltraSPARC III with 10 processors up against your Athlon system, and we'll see.
The AMD and Intel -chips are great for Joe Average, and average needs, but these processors
cater for entirely different needs. Even a single-processor UltraSPARC III -box would trash the athlon when it comes to professional openGL-performance.
Don't get me wrong, you have a great system, but it's not the beginning and end of everything.
Agreed. I've had my suggestions rejected in like fashion only to have similar ones posted at a later date.
<RANT bitchiness="leona">Of course this just makes us sound like a bunch of whiners about the "good old days" of Slashdot. But it's an oft-observed effect that once a good thing is started, it doesn't take long for the turkeys to drag it into the mud.</RANT>
Actually, if the faster card is out is on x86, then it has everything to do with x86 architecture. Granted, Nvidia could release this card for SUN, but tell me, does the USIII have an AGP port? That would be a pretty big thing hindering performance right there. It's like I tell my mac zealot friend, sure the G4 can do more fp per clock cycle than my Athlon, but it's a moot point when the graphics cards that are on my x86 are orders of magnitude faster, and my PC has a high bandwidth dedicated port for the card. There's no doubt that a SUN with AGP and a good graphics card would be a great high end 3D workstation, but don't hold your breath. And until then, there is no way that I will recommend them to customers. By the time Nvidia brings there cards to SUN workstations, there will probably already be a new sparc architecture release. Investing in a SUN at this point in time in the hope that something comes out would be an incredibly stupid decision. Computers go obsolete way too fast, and you're better off waiting until the support is there before dropping $10,000+ when by the time a card that's good comes out for it, you'll be able to get a 2.5 Ghz athlon that would be just as fast, for about $2,000.
In my new job, we use Sun computers. My observation is that they are amazingly slow GUI tools (which I don't use; I am in a 20 year time warp, back to vi and dbx)
...
The Sun software leaves a lot to be desired (run OpenBSD or SparcLinux rather than Slowaris), but the hardware is fantastic. You can even run SparcLinux on an E10000 - and apparently it compiles the Linux kernel in ~20 seconds. I doubt if your Win98 box can match that
Chris
Same here - not impressed. Sun has people hooked and they don't know better.
When you're talking about *real* installations doing *real* computing work then Sun has people hooked because their hardware scales well. You could of course take the Yahoo! route of having massive amounts of simple Intel boxes, but for seriously intensive tasks a couple of big Sun machines are a lot less hassle. Rather than having to piss around with RPC or CORBA to synch up many computers working on the same problem, you can simply code your application(s) without regard for parallel computing issues.
Chris
Indeed. In the case of Sybase for Linux, however, it performs an explicit file buffer flush on every disk write, to ensure that it's written. Of course, this slows it down something awful, but better safe than fast.
Hey, thanks for the info and the correction. That definitely deserves a +5. Next time, I'll know to compare the base values.
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Lets recap, shall we?
Sparc: Possible contender
Itanium: Probable winner
Sledgehammer: Expected no-show
Alpha: Dying, Also Ran
MIPS: Out of production, Also Ran
HPPA: Possible contender if anyone knew about 'em.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Of course the USIII's don't have AGP they are processors. :^) Seriously though the Sun Ultra line has something like AGP! It's called UPA (Ultra Port Architecture) and runs @ 100-112.5Mhz/64bits. They also produce boards that have more than 1 of them unlike AGP. At least you made me laugh at your ignorance.
Let's see here: 100mhz at 64 bits, is 768MB/sec of bandwidth 266mhz at 32 bits is 1024MB/sec of bandwidth AGP 4xwins hands down. You also have to look at the bandwidth on the graphics cards, the elites are notoriously slow. Ok, here we go... Dude, you're retarded, no fucking shit the USIII is a processor, I was referring to the architecture that's designed around the USIII. Go ahead and buy a USIII, I'll save about $10,000 and have a PC that's twice as fast in opengl. The nice thing about slashdot, is that most of these dumbshits (like you)recommending SUN's for opengl aren't in the field, and most of the guys dumb enough to believe they are fast at opengl, don't have enough money to buy one. So, at least people aren't losing any money. The only thing that's annoying, is the spread of misinformation. Do me a favor, look up the specs on the elite3d or whatever SUN's "top of the line" graphics card and compare it to what's available for PC's, it's no comparison. You're friend even agreed with me when I told him that the PC had faster graphics cards. He comes off saying that the SUN kicks ass in opengl, and then I correct him, and so he fucking caves in and says, yeah, but, if the SUN had an nvidia card, THEN it would be faster. Well, who cares? That's like recommending that someone buy a car because in 10 years, someone might produce a better engine for it. Who gives a shit, by then it will be ready for the junk heap. Oh, please enlighten me about the way you make a living, since you seem to know SOOOO much about computers. I would be willing to bet from your know-it-all attitude that you're an NT admin. And your other argument. Your saying that the SUN's proprietary port is a good thing. You're even dumber than I thought. How in the fuck does SUN expect any graphics card manufacturer to waste their time with a proprietary hardware port for such a small market segment? No wonder the selection of graphics cards sucks. That lends even less credit to the idea of nvidia EVER bringing their cards to the SUN. And no, elite3d's are slow, I've used them, they suck. So do the Creator's. They aren't even 50% as fast.
Then of course there's that cost aspect. There's no way Sun can get their cost down -- it's all about volume here. Intel and AMD can sell their 64-bit architecture to consumers eventually since they already have that business model worked out. Then you are making big assumptions that people want to drop legacy support, whether they can afford to or not. Then not running Windows will be hard to minimize. As much as I'd like the world's most popular OS's to all be *nix-based, I just don't see it happening. Heck, well over half the engineering grads in the world don't know flip about unix when they get their BS's.
Sun would have to play their cards wayyyyyyyyyyyy right to take any market share at all. There's no chance AMD and Intel will be caught with their pants around their ankles. I'd say you were definitely smoking something strong. If Sun wanted to make a viable play into the server market, they should have done it by now. They've had 64-bit datapaths for some time now. Waiting until the competition has comparable architectures is missing an important window.
> Check www.spec.org; in short, Intel just got kicked into touch. A new US III 900MHz
> workstation is getting over twice the FP performance of a roughly equivalent Intel chip.
Though the 900MHz UltraSPARC III an amazingly high performer in specfp2000 (482 peak, for those not up to date). But it is hardly twice that of current x86 chips! The top line AMD and Intel x86 chips are both above 330 peak. That makes the fastest UltraSPARC III 46% faster than the fastest x86 chips, not 100% faster.
However, the 900MHz USIII may not be available at the intro. It may only achieve server volumes around, say, a couple months from now. So, you really should be comparing it against x86 chips which will be available around the end of November. What will we have then?
Intel (barring delays) will have announced their 1.50GHz and 1.40GHz Pentium 4. Rumoured (pretty much confirmed, btw) specfp for the 1.50GHz Pentium 4 is 524, which is well above what the USIII is published at. Mind you, the P4-1.5 is not expected to achieve volume production for quite a while after intro, but this very high score means that even a lower frequency P4 should outperform the USIII-900 score.
AMD will likely have available for purchase by then a 1.30GHz (1.20GHz at the worst case, likely) Athlon, possibly based on their incrementally improved Mustang core, and probably outfitted with 2.133GB/s PC2100 Double Data Rate SDRAM. Additionally, they are slowly attaining optimized compiler support thanks to the efforts of DEC. I cannot say what the score will be, but I expect that it will be north of 400, even with current compilers.
Of course, all of this is moot. Sun doesn't need to be faster than x86. The two platforms do not compete in the same market segments. On the contrary, Sun has to compete against the Merced (Itanium). And given Intel's comments about the processor (they have openly stated that spec2000 is not a relevant benchmark for Itanium, which means that it likely performs like crap), I don't think Sun will have much of a problem competing against Intel in terms of specfp performance until the release of McKinley (IA-64 generation 2) in late 2001 or more likely 2002.
-JC
Geez. maybe we should kill off that vine then? Honestly, the commercial Linuxes have done far more to pave the way for Linux than Linux could have ever done for itself...
Rather than saying that Linux is killing off Unix, it's more accurate to say that Linux is growing the Unix market. It's going to places that no commercial unix ever thought to go (sub $1000 machines, et al).
How can high-end proprietary hardware be a bad idea in the long term? If it gets the job done, it gets the job done. Sun's not going to disappear anytime soon, so you'll always have service and support. And i bet of you to point out any hardware based on commodity products that can compete with "proprietary" at the high end...
would anyone like to discuss the GODDAMN NEW PROCESSORS??
C is for Cookie.
Looking at the actual speed of the CPU in benchmarks, you should be comparing to a 1 GHz Pentium III. According real world test, the 500 MHz G4 should be compared to a much higher MHz PC counterparts.
Intel Pentium III 1 GHz, $750 http://www.pricewatch.com/1/3/2448-1.htm
AMD Athlon 1 GHz, $445 http://www.pricewatch.com/1/3/2219-1.htm
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."
I feel safe predicting that Steve Jobs would sooner fly to Denmark to marry Bill Gates in a ceremony broadcast around the world than even consider inking such a deal with Sun again.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Slashdot sucks, film at 11.
News for nerds, with sane submission queues
A great place to troll (heck, even their articles are trolls!)
An appropriate place for song parodies because everyone loves song parodies!
I realize slashdot has this all in one place, but the moderation system and the userbase is so pathetic these days that it's a wonder we old-timers bother to stick around. I've had this account for less than a week, and I'm already disgusted with slashdot! It used to take months for that to happen...
Will the real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up
+else if (about(art,"mp3")) {
+accept(art);
+accept(art);
+accept(art);
+accept(art);
+}
Whoo hoo! Lets see how many people will mod this sucker insightful! Essay generators rule.
Yes... you can certainly ls on solaris on PC and connect to NIS and do all sorts of other neat tricks, but when you are supporting a product that has been in place on sparcs for years (read: old products that vendor made for sparc back when there was little choice and vendor is not able/willing to retool to x86 now) there is definately a need/use for newer faster machines.
Besides, sun isn't trying to sell to every Tom Dick and/or Harry. As you said, there's tons of things you don't *need* sparc for - but there are a little more than you think that having one sure is nicer than not and there are a lot of companies (US, UK, and abroad) that enjoy relying on sun stuff.
So is sun hardware too expensive for what it does - well, if it fills a niche that cheaper machines can't then no. Think of it like your Ford in your driveway - there are tons on the road, many can afford them - it's like the perverbial (sp?) PC. Then look at NASCAR. Sure for what most people do a NASCAR piece of hardware is excessive and not cheap - but there is a use for them that draws in a lot of money ever year. Does this mean new NASCAR inovations aren't good to hear about? Not when you consider that many advances in consumer automobile technology stem from NASCAR acheivements (motor oil improvements and brake technology come to mind). What sorts of invovations in the PC market (not just transistors - I'm also talking sales, support, etc...) stem from Sun innovations??
Wheeeee
BUZZ
I'm sorry, it's a queue, not a stack, but thanks for playing.
Ok.. so the linklink in a post above they state:
UltraSPARC-III, which is designed to operate at 600 MHz
Are they over clocking?? Are they not listening to their spec group's specs of the design?? Does the left hand not know what the right is doing??
Wheeeee
Back in February, Ace's Hardware had a really great in-depth article on the UltraSparc series.
It starts by covering the history of the SPARC architecture, and what their naming conventions mean (eg. what is the difference between a US I, a US II, and a US III). It then looks at the design decisions that were made for the US3, which included previous UltraSparc binary compatibility, reducing load latency, pipelining, branch prediction, and scalability. The dicussion of all these topics are rather technical.
The article is long, and the techno-babble may scare off some, but if you have any knowledge of basic CPU operation, particularly of RISC cores, or if you are just curious about some of the quirks related to designing a CPU, you'll eat that article up.
"There is no knowledge that is not power"
I believe "Chiborashka" (I guess my spelling is wrong) used to be a Russian cartoon character who always manages to fal(incidentally also the nickname of the Mig-23 fighter plane among Russian pilots). Is that what your username is referring to?
Sorry for the off-topic question, just curious.
--
BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
Thats impressive, but an E450 (thats Sun Enterprise 450)can hold 4 CPU's, 64gb RAM(I think), 20 disks internal, and 10 PCI's.
--
The facts expressed here belong to all, the opinions to me. The distinction between fact and opinion is yours to decide.
A Beowulf cluster of these....sorry, it's traditional and everything. Who was the originator of that saying, by the way?
Actually a Ultra 5 (US-II 450, with a 17" monitor) I believe is about $3000 US, so go ahead....
Actually Sun hardware is not even that expensive for thing that Intel systems can compete in. Price a 4 CPU Xeon system from a real vendor like Compaq or IBM, and you'll see that a 4 CPU Sun will be in the same ballpark (despite being 64-bit, etc).
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
What does windows have to do with these new Sun CPU's? nothing at all. So why refering to them then? Ain't this editor's note a bit too much offtopic and a bit too much of a 'biased' seed to control the discussions?
Be fair. The new sparc is an awesome CPU. it will be combined with extrodinairy cool hardware in the new sun servers, and will run a kickass operating system, solaris 8. No need for offtopic rants and raves about microsoft and their products.
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
The athlon 450 doesn't exist
The Athlon must be the 500Mhz then. There is one K-6 and one Athlon and they are 50Mhz apart. They are on the same desk. I don't pay a lot of attention the the fine details of PC hardware; I'm tired of dealing with junk.
Find a clue
A "me too" comment so soon?
I am tired of typing and it is starting to storm really hard. The power could go out and I want to spend some time with my beautiful girlfriend before we go to bed. I will write one final paragraph.
Actually read a post before you make someone correct your mistakes. The post that I replied to mentioned the lack of AGP for the Ultra architecture and I just mentioned that there is *something* like the AGP architecture for Ultra(a dedicated bus for graphics). She/He was ignorant on the matter. I wan't endorsing it, saying it was faster, nor was I claiming that it was open. I just gave some specs and the fact that machines are made with more than one. Good day.
A friend of mine is a contractor for Sun and I can verify this information(except I am posting as AC for fear of my life.) Sun has been shooting themselves in the foot with all the negative news about them lately (exploiting a hole in the GPL, keeping this processor crap under wraps, etc...)
How is the new SPARC compared to the wildly racing Intel and AMD processors?
Did anyone else read this? (I heard it earlier in a NDA.) You can mix different speed CPUs in the same system. Talk about major cool. So if you're in a tight squeeze, and you need some extra juice, and you've got an older or newer processor laying around, use it! Yummy.
Supposedly, Sun is (was?) having a hard time ramping up production of the higher-speed Ultra Sparc III's (heh, kinda like Motorola & their 7400 (aka G4)), so they were planning on selling several of the lower-speed models (like 550-650MHz) on Ebay. (Here is a CNET News.com link that confirms possible eBay sales...)
Doh!
Come now, the UltraSparc volumes would make intel and amd roll over laughing.
Don't get me wrong; I really like Sun hardware for the most part. But it ain't perfect.
(Wearable 8-processor UltraSPARC III's would make for a decent FreeCiv client. It'd also keep you toasty-warm in winter.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
We ordered a whack of UltrasparcII workstations (U10/U60s) from them in July, with an August ship date, and as of Today (Sept 24) the only Sun box around here is the SparcStation 10 holding up the coffee maker. It looks like a very nice chip, but periodically the customer likes to get hold of one too.
There is a company, called HAL. They belong to Fujitsu. They make UltraSPARC-compatible processors and servers. I've seen somewhere on their site that their next generation of chips will be PIN-compatible with the US-II, so they might become a source of upgrade.
http://www.hal.com/
http://mpd.hal.com/
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
there ARE Sun clones available
Yup, and I wasn't saying otherwise, although I suppose it could easily be inferred from my comment. I have even come across a few clones like the Opus ones, but not Fujitsu's.
For info on all things Sun, chekc out www.sunhelp.org, which includes great info on older Sun models if you're ever thinking of buying one.
Chris
For those of you who don't know, the US-III webcast will be at http://www.sun.com/webcast/neteffect/ at 10am EST..
For a sneak peak at one of the new machines I found online today... check out the Sun Fire 280R, which is the US-III replacement for the E220R. Amazing what you can do when you guess URL's.
IMAGINE BEOWULF CLUSTER OF THESE
Seriously, I believe that even a cluster of Alphas will be way cheaper than a cluster of those UltraSPARC's for the same productivity.
Remove the $sessionid$ bit. Try this link instead.
--
Turn on, log in, burn out...
Given that the contracts a good deal of data centers sign with clients specify hefty penalties for downtime other than scheduled maintenance, I don't think that Sun gear is overpriced for what it delivers. Its not just a matter of buying good hardware, its a matter of buying hardware with failure rollover.
Also, most people don't quite get the idea when they see the term: enterprise. Enterprise class machinery typically deals with multiple boxes with multiple CPUs and tens or hundreds of gigs of RAM with failure rollover and other nifty features.
And the cost is mostly in the hardware. I'm sure someone could design and build Linux box that had as much hardware as most of the Sun boxes in our datacenter, but I'd doubt it would be much less expensive. 20+ CPUS and twenty or thirty gigs of RAM per machine starts to add up when you have a cluster of fifteen or twenty boxes for just one client.
Now if you're only talking about clustering a few Linux boxes each with two or four processors, then, yeah, Linux will likely get you much better price/performance with the same sort of stability. Unfortunately, this isn't quite what Sun has in mind when it targets the Enterprise market.
"Doesn't suffer the incompatability problems of cheap PC parts"
... 60 pounds sterling!!! The lead turned out to be the wrong one, and I wasn't even entitled to a refund, just a poxy credit slip. Eventually I got one from a very small Sun reseller for a tenner.
For the most part this is true...but check out the SCSI connectors on the Ultra 1 and Ultra 1 Creator. Yay for gratuitous incompatibility
Ahem. I remember trying to get a printer lead for my Sparc and HP Deskjet. The normally reliable Black Box peripheral people assured me they could get the right lead for
Chris
Sun is trying to retain the upper end market (8+ CPU servers) against other UNIX/Linux servers. and trying to move downstream to the personal/small business servers.
MicroSoft is trying to move into the large server market with NT products that work on 8 or more CPUs.
If customers are using Solaris, they aren't using NT.
For that matter, when is Compaq's next revision of their mid-range servers supposed to come out. I'd at least like to see them move to the 750 MHz CPUs.
My first encounter with Sun products was when a SparcStation 1+ was offloaded onto my desk. My employer at the time wanted an FTP server, and the budget wouldn't run to a new machine. Consequently, the sys admin put together the SS1+ from a box of Sparcs abandoned by the company typesetters.
That machine ran for years, with the only downtime occuring when I switched from SunOS to Linux (RedHat 4.2 - the first distro I remember that actually outshone the commercial Unices).
Since then, I have worked on a mix of Sun and Intel hardware, but have always favoured the former for its reliability. While PC's are cheap, thanks mainly to the proliferation of clones and myriad peripheral manufacturers, many reliability and performance problems stem from the subtle incompatabilities of PC parts.
Most Sun computers contain nothing but Sun manufactured parts - although many parts are simply rebranded third party bits. For instance, my CD drive is a Toshiba with a Sun fascia, but it has been tested thoroughly for compatability and reliablity. This means higher prices, but when I plugged the CD drive into my Sparc 5 back in '96, I had a greater expectation that it'd work than friends plugging CD drives into their PC's.
This 'monopoly' on hardware often garners criticism from Apple's detractors, especially after they pulled the plug on Mac clones. However, Apple hardware shares the increased reliability of Sun equipment in part thanks to this 'monopoly'.
Chris
Thanks for the sentiment, Mr. Thesaurus.
Dyspeptic, what kind of an asshole uses the word dyspeptic?
Antihumanist Misanthropy: Care to define, or are you just going to throw out big words, and hope they mean something profound.
Wait, I just realized I may be battling whits with an asshole dialog generator. Maybe it just spits out obscure words according to some Mad Lib'esque plan. I feel silly.
-Mecha
Well, the "masses" buy PCs anyway, they'd never be interested in a Sun.
Alphas are a fair comparison, but I'd like to see where you can get an ev6 for less than Sun hardware. The lowest I've seen for a reasonable configuration is around $3000 USD.
True, PC hardware doesn't have the same reliability an scalability as Sun stuff, but you'd be hard pressed to argue that for POWER architecture (think RS/6000 & SP (Deep Blue), AS/400, S/390), or big Alpha-based systems. It will be interesting to see some server benchmarks on the new Suns - if the new proc lives up to the hype, it should make quite a machine. Alphas and POWER have had them beat in performance (since the UltraSparc II is getting pretty old).
;-) and the old Cray-1 was definitely the coolest looking machine - came with it's own couch, all it needed was a matching coffee table 8^)
Nothing keeps a room warm like a Cray
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Sun hardware is NOT expensive for what it does,
and Intel based systems cannot compete in the fields that the UltraSPARC is aimed at.
For example, can Intel hardware currently run 200-prosessor SMP-systems?
Sun hardware is expensive, but for the added expense, you get safety and reliability, that a lot of companies ARE willing to pay.
Of course, for the average Joe User, the UltraSPARC III will never be an issue.
Hmmmm, maybe it's one of those funny stacks, where you can get stuff off of the bottom... oh wait, that's a queue... damn, almost had it...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
On the page that announces/discusses the UltraSPARC III you'll see that the image shown to the right is an UltraSPARC II! (do a view image)
D'ohhhhh!
One strength is it scalability. The other is reliability. How fast is a P-III that has just crashed?
Its not X86, its cool.
Its Sun, its cool.
Does it run Linux?
I can't wait to get a Boewulf cluster of these
Sun sucks. Alphas rule.
Sun sucks, IBM power pcs rules
Why would this chip be on a desktop since its a server chip?
Slashdot sucks, I posted this a long time ago. Lets moderate stories.
Lets see if I can post a link to Sun to get moderated up as informative.
Debian will run on the following desktop archs to some extent. Afaik only alpha, i386 and mips ever had a Windows port (alpha and mips for winnt).
alpha
arm
hppa
i386
m68k
mips
mipsel
ppc
sh
sparc
The problem with Sun hardware is that it's simply too expensive for what it does. Alpha & Power systems are cheaper (in the UK anyway) and Intel based systems can perform 99% of the tasks that Sun systems can do.
So, sorry if I'm not over the moon.
Deleted
Unlike Intel's processor with 3 i's, maybe Sun's WILL actually make the internet faster (from the server side of course, to reduce the "demands of the Net Effect" i.e. /.)
and x86 architecture is good from a price/performance standpoint right now
Yeah, right.
I always thought the biggest mistake Sun and (formerly) DEC made was not flooding the market in the early '90s and going after the desktop, back when SPARC and Alpha were much, much, faster than Intel/486 and Motorola/680x0 and Un*x was much better, more stable than windows or macos (of course, un*x is still better, but IMO the gap is smaller). I guess they were worried about giving up their big margins on servers.
I think there is another window of opportunity here for Sun and Compaq/Alpha to strike. They are 64 bit already. Open Source is closing the applications gap and removing hardware-dependency. It would be cool if they could win by selling midrange CPU/mobo combinations at prices similar to what you see on pricewatch for midrange Athlon and PIII.
OK, It'll never happen, but I can dream
Fire, that is..... :-)
Don't pick up the pho*(@)$*@&@!@ NO CARRIER
SPECfp2000 results are available for the UltraSparc-III 900 MHz. It scored a 482. Pretty damn quick, especially when you consider that its score is more than 50% higher than the Pentium-III 933 Mhz, which got a 305.
Of course, if you consider cost, it nearly evens out.. but people don't buy Suns cause they are cheap.
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
The comment was made by dialog generator that specializes in complaints. You just plug a name into it and it spits out a rambling, incoherent complaint with alot of big words. I just can't remember the name of the site that has it. I am surprised at the number of people who have made fools of themselves by being taken in by it. The author of the parent post must be ROFL his ass off.
and x86 architecture is good from a price/performance standpoint right now Translation: I can't afford to buy anything besides a x86 drekbox, therefore the price/performance ratio is pretty good. Unless you can show me a box that processes 1,3 million keys per second on the distributed.net client that costs less than $300.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
The trouble with Athlon is that system/board makers have cut too many corners on cost.
If Athlon systems had cache/bus performance similar to current Alpha or SPARC, sure, it would be comparable to those in throughput. (It would also be comparable in price.)
I think that any expansion of processor choices is good. That said, I'm not likely to go to Sun anytime soon. I'm too damned cheap, and x86 architecture is good from a price/performance standpoint right now.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Dude you should seriously consider running for a political office. You need some refinement but you are well on to the path of expert longwinded doublespeak that says absolutely nothing at all. Keep practicing and you may end up a senator or even a high paid PR spokesperson for some high level corporation.
Slashdot article selection:
while (articles_left())
{
article art = get_article_somewhere_in_the_stack();
if (about(art, "microsoft"))
accept(article);
else if (about(art, "big corporation") && (rand()%2 == 0))
accept(art);
else if (rand % 10 == 0)
accept(art);
else
reject(art);
}
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec