Sun's New Workstations and Graphics Cards

An anonymous reader "Sun Microsystems has released the Sun Blade 2000 workstation, along with a new graphics accelerator, the XVR-1000. This could very well give SGI's lineup a run for its money in the CAD and Visualization fields, although its fillrate and 38-bit colour may make it less desirable for animation. Make sure to check out Ace's article. " (page down a couple times to read it)

Comments

Re:What are these still used for?

[Dog-Cow]

Ford Motor owns about 7000 Suns, and still buys them. PCs just don't have the applications that CAD/CAM desisgners need to get real work done. There are some big software packages ported to Windows, like I-DEAS, Unigraphics, and Catia, but the whole workflow and ancillary apps are non-existant.

Re:What are these still used for?

[Dirk Pitt]

This is true. And SGI certainly doesn't even have a large share of the MCAD market. Mostly Sun and HP/UX. SGI is a valid option, but doesn't touch the other two in terms of performance.

As for PCs, NOBODY's doing large model work on them. Small shops might use them because they're economical, but no one would use a PC to work with multi-thousand surface/100k+ element geometry/FEM. Perhaps this is a Windows limitation, not hardware architecture; it's hard to tell because most of the big 4 (Catia/ProE/Unigraphics/Ideas) don't have a Linux port yet, AFAIK.

Re:Sun's in trouble

[Hiro Antagonist]

You really need to work on your understanding of "high end"; Sun's high-end is boxes like the E10K and E15K -- and it's an area where Intel has no leverage. An E15K can support multiple hardware domains, up to 106 US3 900MHz CPUs, and over a half *terabyte* of RAM.

You find me an Intel machine with those specs. Oh, and it must be fully managable from a remote site down to the hardware level; you have to be able to turn CPUs on and off, power the machine up and down, re-assign drive IDs, and such -- remotely.

The eight-way xSeries competes more with Sun's low-end server hardware, which is comprable in price; I can't really give an exact figure without knowing what this server is for.