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Sun's New Workstations and Graphics Cards

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the chasing-after-sgi dept.

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)

9 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. What are these still used for? by qurob · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not flame bait, but a legitimate question. What would someone be using a $34,000 workstation for? Even a $9,000 one?

    They can't possibly be selling THAT many of them.

    Anyone here using them? What for? Is a PC really not that powerful?

    1. Re:What are these still used for? by BWJones · · Score: 3, Interesting

      There are MANY uses for such a machine and this is the reason why Sun and SGI are still in business. Try medical imaging, combustion simulation, particle simulation, subatomic simulation, CAD/CAM design of complete/complex things like aircraft or automobiles, battlefield visualization etc etc etc....

      Many applications in the modeling/simulation end of things need to run for days or weeks and have system requirements for RAM that are not met by simple commodity PC hardware. The bounds are always going to be pushed and for many, fast Intel hardware does the job. But for those that are always pushing the boundaries and for those whose time is VERY important will go with the higher end hardware.

      Win2k has improved, but running compute intensive code even on the latest 2.2Ghz P4 with 1GB of RAM is too unstable and takes too long. Add to that M$'s lousy multiple monitor support.

      UNIX is where it is at for intensive computing. Yes, Linux is cheap and can be run on cheap hardware, but I can't get Linux boxes with 8GB of RAM, access to Firewire, and plug and play can be a nightmare. I want my workstations to be able to do it all from surfing the web, to writing papers, to modeling, to compute intensive algorithms over the weekend. For this I and others will pay more.

      My hope is that Apple takes the scientific computing thing seriously. OSX is a nice OS, but right now they just don't have the horsepower to make for a serious hardware competitor in the workstation market. If they can get the CPU's and bus speed up to snuff and pack in more RAM, I'll buy lots of shiny new Apples and others I work with will do the same.

      --
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  2. Sun never needed to "answer Intel's 64-bit CPUs" by beamz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sun never needed to answer to Intel's 64bit cpus. Sun corners a market that Intel has not even begun to penetrate yet.

    Just the fact that Sun and Alpha have been doing 64bit years illustrates that fact.

    Also there is a little bit of a misconception here. They perform drastically different because of the SMP bus architecture and just the fact that it's CISC vs RISC etc.

  3. Looks like a very nice machine by Pussy+Is+Money · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Specifically, 3DRAM implements an on-chip ALU and SRAM cache to handle alpha blending and Z buffer operations inside the framebuffer itself.
    The ALU-in-RAM is just brilliant. Why move the data to where the operations are when you can move the operations to where data is?
    --
    Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
  4. Re:Sun's in trouble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    You mean like these?

    http://www.compaq.com/products/servers/

    Ok, intel and alpha. But still...

  5. I just wish Sun truely supported linux. by BrookHarty · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We have sun blade 100's at work, and they make great workstations. But being a rebel I wanted to put Linux on it. The only Linux distro with the best support was SUSE 7.3. Suse is a great distro, but they can only do so much without help from SUN.

    Some major problems with linux on sunblades.
    1. DMA doesnt work correctly.
    2. GFX card drivers, only the basic onboard card is supported, dont get the high end elite cards.
    3. Sound support is a hit or miss, sometimes it detects and loads the modules, havnt figured this out.

    For a 1000 bux box, usb and firewire, dvd, takes PC memory for a SB100. If linux was truely supported, they would sell ALOT more.

  6. Re:2x the performance for 10x the price by Derkec · · Score: 5, Interesting

    2x the performance can be worth 10x or more the price in some circumstances. If that performance gain means a 5% productivity gain for an engineer that costs your company 100K a year, $3400 starts to sound cheap. If it improves the framerate in your video games, it's damn expensive. It's all about what gain you're going to get out of the 2x performance gain.

  7. I want one to replace my Matrox card by Com2Kid · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I want one of these to replace my Matrox G400 Dual Head MAX card. :~(

    Sad that it is not PC compatible, though I can guess as to why.

    Sun should seriously think about getting into the PC hardware business for the high end proffesionals, there really is more potential to sell peripherals for the wide PC market then there is in trying to get everybody to switch over to their plateform. (how ever kick ass their machines may be.)

    Ah, besides, a G400 MAX card that could do a bit more in the 3D arena from time to time would also be nice, hehe. I would seriously like to be able to run the occasional game at a resolution higher then 640x480@16bit color (well actualy I can run in 32bit color since the G400 was one of the first consumer cards to not take /too much/ of a hit from running in 32bit color VS running in 16bit color. Now days a lot of cards run better in 32bit color then they do in 16bit color. . . .)

    Ah, and no the G500 is not what I am talking about. ^_^

    Oh well, hopefuly the Kyro3 will be coming out Any Day Now(TM), though I do believe that it is a year or so behind its unofficaly leaked due date, LOL!

    --
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  8. Facts Instead of Hype by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Indeed, both the Power4 and the Pentium 4 (P4) significantly outperform an UltraSPARC III. Just visit the SPEC web site and the web site of the Transaction Processing Council (TPC) . The performance results at those web sites show that the UltraSPARC III significantly underperforms against the competition. For this very reason, Sun is refusing to run Linux on the UltraSPARC III. Running Linux on UltraSPARC III would allow an even more direct, head-on comparison between the UltraSPARC III and the Power4 or P4. Same OS (Linux). Yet, Power4 and P4 outperform UltraSPARC III. There would be no way for Sun to say, "Well, Solaris causes the UltraSPARC III to run slower than the competition because Solaris is using the extra CPU cycles to give you that much more reliability."

    As the official line, Sun Microsystems derides with the SPEC benchmarks and the TPC benchmarks as being unfair and unrepresentative of the "real world". How can any company utter such asinine comments? Both SPEC and TPC are fair, reputable organizations that have set forth to provide a fair and unbiased means to compare a range of computer systems from various companies. You might say that both SPEC and TPC are the "Consumer Reports" of the server market.

    To look at something that is really asinine, I highly recommend Big Blue Smoke , which is a childish web site that Sun established to ridicule IBM. Sun must be getting really desperate.