Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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)

4 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?

  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: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.