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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)

6 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.

      --
      Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
  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. 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.

  5. 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.