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Want a Sparc Workstation for $995?
frankie writes "Several news agencies are reporting that Sun is breaking the $1000 mark with its Blade 100 workstation. It's got USB, FireWire, and PCI -- aimed at competing with the x86 desktop market. One thing it doesn't have, though, is any mention at all on Sun's own web site..."
EEC ram is designed for the European Economic Commmunity. It complies with the stronger safety, quality, and legal requirements required in the new European Union. It will generally cost 3X as much as US ram, largely because of extra taxes.
If it breaks down, however, the universal tech support available in most liberal European countries will repair it free of charge.
(Score:-1, Underranted)
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What about this? OK, it's the Sun store, but it's there.
Hardware prices are seldomly relevant, at least not in the range you're talking about. Peanuts, as they say here in Germany...
Setup costs (person hours of consultants, and also of internal staff) makes up a much larger amount. As an example, the last Sun HA cluster I did set up costed roughly $750K. Implementation costs were above $1M. Implementation costs for a Linux cluster would have been even larger. (Just ignoring for the moment that Linux clusters are not yet ready for mission-critical systems.)
Maintenance (better: support) contracts is always a sad topic. It severly depends on the vendor staff you work with. Actually, since this story is on Sun - I had very good experience with our Gold-Plus and Platin support contracts - but their price tag is a bit higher than the one quoted by you... :-)
Sorry to say this, but you don't seem to have experience in financing system installations in an industrial setting.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
While the U5 was more expensive, I had one and let me attest that it sucked. The base config comes with IDE everything, 4GB hard drive, a slow processor (can't remember the exact numbers) and 128MB of RAM. All this for only twice what you could get an equivalent PC for. The video was limited to 256 colors at any reasonable resolution, etc. My Linux box (a dell pII-300) blew it out of the water on every benchmark and was cheaper.
Yeah, this thing is cheaper than the u5. But Sun workstations have not really been performance competitive with the PC world for five years now. Somehow, I suspect that this box isn't going to be any better.
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I was under the impression that matrix multiplication paralleized fairly well, if the matrices were big enough. It's kinda Cilk's poster problem, isn't it?
Mind you, if the matrices are small, then the ILP you get from a well unrolled inner loop will be hard to beat.
And as already pointed out, the speed at which the individual FLOPs are done counts too -- tho I hadn't expected the PIII to be twice as slow, for equal Mhz.
Assuming that it is loaded with Solaris 8 w/ Nutscrape and StarOffice for applications, they would be wise to get business people to try it out and if they buy it, hopefully get them to buy into Sun's Support services as well. That's where they stand to make some considerable cash for themselves.
The next step they need to do however, is to mass market this to get it in people's minds. Just offering it on the website and getting geeks like us talking about it is not enough to make it a success.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
My girlfriend wouldn't let me buy the 1/2 ton VAX for $105 though :(
Rader
Anyone else find it odd that it costs about $500 to add 128M of RAM? At least that was the only difference I could see between the small and medium configs.
http://www.sun.com/desktop/sunblade100/
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
The SunPCi card uses a 600Mhz Celeron for the processor. Details at http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/sunpci/
I work at an EDU, and sun routinely gives me 20 - 60% discounts depending on the product. They're probably trying to capture market share, and put a dent in linux which has sun scared right now (I deal with sun on almost a daily basis... my sun rep said "we can't compete with linux")... the Blade system is a replacement for the Ultra 5 which cost as little as 1200$ with a edu discount (any student id gets you the discount).
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
"With a PCi card for an extra $195, the Sun Blade 100 machine would be able to run applications on both Microsoft's Windows and Sun's Solaris operating system."
Until I looked it up on Sun's site at: http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/sunpci/sunpcij tf.html
And if you sign up for "maintenance" (read tech support that is even vaguely useful) you're going to drop a lot of money each year for that too. In some cases, more than you'll end up paying more than the cost of the machine. Until we got rid of it recently, at work we were paying $18,000 a year in maintenance for an Onyx/2 that was 3 years old. For reference, you can buy a $4000 PC now that is faster than the machine we had. Granted it was a great machine but we certainly were not getting our money's worth.
And people wonder why linux is gaining such a following...
Hate to reply to my own post, but I saw the answer on another thread. Info at Sun's Site.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!