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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)
How does that break down storage wise?
Will Sun continue to make the old model?
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-860701.html
This thing comes equipped with dual 1.05GHz Ultrasparc III CPUs. I guess these are Sun's answer to Intel's 64-bit CPUs.
Personally, I'd like to see this and HP's PA-RISC architectures gain some footholds again. HP might be too far behind, but a 1GHz 64-bit CPU certainly isn't behind in technology.
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SGI is going bankrupt and hasn't released any new innovative products in years. I'd hope a new(er) sun box could beat them. It's only been on the drawning board for about two and a half years now. Then again, when they made a superiour operating system, they couldn't beat Microsoft. When they made a superiour processor, they couldn't beat Digital or Intel. So they probably won't beat SGI. As Sun is going right now, they themselves probably wont be around in a year or two. Thank you linux!
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
Here is a mirror.
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My Slashdot ads say "
http://www.sun.com/2002-0314/feature/
The system ships with a 73gb fibrechannel harddisc, 900 or 1.05 UltraSparcIII (dual capable), and a gig of ram. nice box. It sets a world record in workstation performance (halfway down the press-release).
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?
SunBlades have served better as terminals in the past. I don't really know if this newer offering is going to be any good or not. While the specs do look impressive, there may be smaller things that keep the SGI workstations on top. Solaris does make a great desktop unix OS though. I loved it when I had a SPARCstation.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
Direct link to the post as a stand-alone page.
This could very well give SGI's lineup a run for its money in the CAD and Visualization fields
Maybe, except that that most of the 3D Unix stuff is designed for SGI/Irix... I guess when you're Sun you can get stuff ported if you want, though!
Looks like a kickass box.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
I meant published, not packaged. As slashcode tells me, I shold have used the 'preview'-button.
I have Sunblade 100, from which I write this comment. From my experience, this machine is by a factor 4 (yes, four) time slower than a new Athlon XP 1.9... And it costs much much more.
If it wasn't for endianness compatibility with existing binary data, I wouldn't be using it.
In case you've been under a rock for the past 5 years...
HP kinda joined forces with INTEL to make their 64 bit CPU
and at only $11K its a steal.
Or rather, thats the only way I'm getting one, theft.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
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.
and at only $11,000 for the base entry (with no keyboard or monitor and at 900 mhz w/ only 1 cpu) model they're a steal ;P (clicking through the options it's actually more, $45 for a usb keyboard? i mean really).. i realize these are aimed at big business but this still doesn't seem realistic
i wonder how they can justify a price tag like that, sure the hardware is great but i'm willing to bet someone could build a comparable p4 machine for well less than half what they're asking..
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
What do you mean 38 bit color makes it less desirable for animation?
That is just wrong. This has 10 bits per component RGB. Typically that's more than enough. In addition animation apps like Maya tend to be geometry and state limited not fill limited.
Ofcourse the tag 'animation' is a bit to vague to mean anything in the first place.
Well done Sun, this should cause SGI some pain, but I'd say more because it gives the impression that Sun is doing something interesting where SGI hasn't done anything genuinely interesting in a LONG time.
I dont think that intel ever really had a question for Sun to answer. At 800MHz, Intel's 64it chip is slow in the all important MHz rating (sun has had 900's out for a while now) and still has a few years of compiler design ahead of it before it makes any sense. And this is Sun's 3+rd generation of 64 bit chips, vs Intel's 1st.
As for HP, they helped intel build their 64 bit chip, so the PA-RISC is more or less dead.
However, I just bought 2 from Sun on a developer deal
for ~800 a piece. How much was the Athlon 1.9? If
it wasn't stolen, they ought to be the same price.
Also what are you running to "benchmark"?
For a more "real" Sun Box try on the Blade 1000 or
Blade 2000. They cost "considerably" more but they
are not teathered by slow 5400 IDE HD's etc. Cheap
video etc. Note that you cannot get this crazy
video card for the Blade 100.
The Blade 100 is what it was meant to be, a cheap
entry level box. Definatly effient and economical
for farms of UNIX coders.
It still is one of the best out there, and the now-defunct Alpha EV8 would have been a powerful contender to IBM POWER4.
Some Alpha EV8 articles:
Alpha EV8 (Part 1): Simultaneous Multi-Threat
Alpha EV8 (Part 2): Simultaneous Multi-Threat
Alpha EV8 (Part 3): Simultaneous Multi-Threat
The Spider and the Mountain (Alpha EV8 vs. Intel Itanium)
You can thank those Compaq morons in Houston and complicit jerks at Intel for killing Alpha, in particular Compaq CEO Michael Capellas. May they be damned to hell.
PA
Heed this warning, if you buy one of these to do rendering make sure to benchmark it before you send Sun a check.
Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time
On their pricing page, a memory upgrade to 4GB is $20,000. wow. A gigbit ethernet card is $1800.
I'm sorta speechless here. What exactly about this machine makes it worth this kind of money?
It's been 2 years since I installed a 32bit cpu or processor in the data center.
Check out the benchmarks at this site. The scores reflect the time in seconds it took the computer to run a specific sequence of pre-defined events. AMD and Intel are KILLING Sun when it comes to price VS performance.
I'm really not sure what Sun can do to stop the tidal wave that appears to be heading toward them. In the early 90's, engineering workstations were REQUIRED for high-end work such as CAD, but nowadays, you can get the same (or better) performance with a sub-$5,000 machine with a great graphics card.
I'd say this is the misconception. The advantages of RISC over CISC for an equivalent clock speed CPU actually vary significantly based on the TYPE of workload. A good example: a while back a customer was complaining that compiles went twice as fast on their HP PC platform (1GHz CPU) than they did on their Sun platform (450MHz CPU). Compiles are almost entirely CPU bound. Found numbers point out that the SPEC ratings for the 1GHz CPU were about twice those of the 450MHz. What a surprise.
The thing is, the machine with the 450MHz CPU had 4 CPUs. If they had invested some effort in configuring a parallel make, the 450MHz machine with 4 CPU's would have approached being able to half the compile time of the single threaded make on the PC.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
>> although its fillrate and 38-bit colour may
.plan once.
.plan about this...
>> make it less desirable for animation
I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean. The fillrate is just fine for a workstation, games generally are the only programs that need a high fillrate, memory bandwidth and size, and of course T&L are *much* more important. The 38 bit internal color is excellent, nicely comparing to SGI ( http://www.sgi.com/workstations/comparison.html ), and unmatched by 3dlabs. The bit-depth of the graphics card has nothing to do with the color rendering accuracy, which is usually 48 or 64 bits for high end stuff. Games really need high bit depth precision for multitexturing, which multiplies color errors. I think Carmack mentioned this in a
Nvidia will probably have 64 bit color in NV30, and 3dfx's rampage was supposed to have 52 bit color ( http://www.digit-life.com/articles/3dfxtribute/ ) Games start needing high bit depths when you have massive multi-texturing, which tends to multiply errors. I think Carmack had a
Where I work, we need computing power for 2 things:
1. Running builds
2. Simulating embedded processors (ARM, mcore) for testing our product.
We have a mix of Sun workstations and x86 linux boxen. We just got one of the new-ish SunBlade1000 for trial (single 900Mhz processor, 1GB RAM).
While the Sunblade kills the competition (1Ghz Pentium4 w/linux) in build times, it's actually slightly slower with the simulations (which were, ironically, developed natively for SUN architecture!)
So, before you think about getting one of these puppies for your own pad, you better find some published benchmarks specific to your needs. There's no magic bullet.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
I dunno about that graphics card. The website doesn't say anything about polygon rates, pixel fill rates or texel fill rates. Historically Sun graphics boards haven't been that great, especially when it comes to texturing. If they made halfway decent graphics they could have killed SGI years ago. But I guess they never figured 3-d graphics to big that big a market for them.
dave
Ok, who is the Einstein you marked my post as redundant. There isn't a post with this info listed above.
Mayhaps we have some Sun employees doing the moderation today....lol.
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
D'ohhh! It's HERE!
The low end really has eaten the high end in graphics hardware. Five years ago, the $1000 boards outperformed the $100 boards by an order of magnitude or more, because the high-end boards had hardware Z-buffers, geometry hardware (the 4x4 matrix multiplier), and hardware texture and lighting support. Today, low-end 3D boards have all that; the high-end boards just have a bit more of everything.
The cost probably reflects about $400 in parts, and millions in engineering cost divided by the few hundred of these boards Sun will sell. That's a losing business proposition.
Sun also announced a 24" high-resolution flat-panel monitor. Any info on that?
Very interresting If they Pull it out.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Doh. That would be everythingunix.ORG. Or go straight to the article here.
Does 10 or 12 bits really make a difference over 8 bits? Of course it does. Most film work these days is rendered in either 12 bits, 10 bits logarithmic, or 16 bits. Think about it: in a dark movie theatre room, 256 levels of grey (for instance) is not a lot. And if that doesn't convince you, think about image manipulation: after a few multiplications and compositions, you'll end up with very little color resolution with 8 bits. And yes, these things are often done in hardware in the color buffer (eg flame).
CISC vs. RISC is irrelevant. Intel and AMD simply convert the CISC instructions to RISC-like instructions internally. The Intel/AMD cores are out-of-order superscalar designs just like the rest of them (well, Sparc is actually in-order but that's a whole different story).
It's funny how models containing the number 2000 sound immediately obsolete by now...
I personally feel there is a more interesting article that is linked to: http://www.sun.com/executives/realitycheck/headsup 020314.html
details MHz-vs-Speed differences. While not the most interesting for the well-informed, it's great for those who know that MHz doesn't necessarily = speed.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Hey, don't call my beautiful 100 a toy! :) Seriously, for me it's perfect, especially with a flat panel. And once my SunPCI card comes in in a few weeks, I can finally reduce my desktop to one keyboard and monitor and run in both unix and windows. Even though both are around 700mhz, nothing I do (run emacs, outlook, listening to mp3s, running a web browser, etc..) will even come close to taxing the CPUs.
_______
2B1ASK1
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.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
An 8-16 CPU machine is not high end. A 60-100 CPU database machine such as an E10k or E15k is high end, and I suspect that really a lot of Sun's profit comes from this area. Sun's only serious competition here is IBM (well, perhaps better to phrase it as Sun are now competing with IBM in this area, as it's historically been IBM's baby) and I suspect the boxes cost kind of the same amount.
Someone did an interesting sum the other day: last year Sun sole ~100,000 cobalt boxes world wide. Maybe they made $200 per box, so that's $20,000,000 profit. In the same period they sold ~100 E10ks in the UK, at maybe $2,000,000 profit per machine. So *in the UK* they made $20,000,000 on E10K sales: the same as they made on cobalts world-wide. You can do similar sums for other low-end boxes.
--tim
on this one. How the heck am I spose to find a bunch of "hardly used" sun sunblades on the cheap for personal use? In this new age of fiscal responsibility and limited cash, there is no way I can convince managment I need one of these as a MP3^H^H^Hsendmail server....
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
*I* want the display: "Sun also unveiled its new 24-inch flat panel monitor, the first digital interface display in the industry to deliver 1920 X 1200 resolution at 60 Hz, fully supporting 2.3 million pixels."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
come on, at least click on the link!
sheesh.
(btw, 10-bit each RGB + 8-bit alpha)
You mean like these?
http://www.compaq.com/products/servers/
Ok, intel and alpha. But still...
It breaks down as a big lie. In the article they claim to be the first to reach 30-bit color. Are they high? Have they even seen an SGI in the last 7 years?
Which "equivalent box"?
An 8-Way Sunfire with 32G RAM and 400G SCSI storage lists for $120K.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Ace is wrong about one thing:
Currently, the XVR-1000 targets primarily the engineering and CAD markets, as opposed to 3D animation, given the rather limited fillrate. However, Sun intends to use the MAJC-5200 to scale the performance of its graphics solutions to higher levels in the future (as seen in this older roadmap), so we may yet see a solution attacking the 3D animation market at some point in the future.
The MAJC-5200 will improve geometry performance (number of triangles, floating point math required), not fillrate (number of pixels/texels shaded, integer math).
Animation requires better fillrate, and more MAJC-5200s won't provide that. MAJC-5200 *will* provide Sun with stronger geometry performance (FLOPS, remember?), which is just what Sun's core engineering and CAD markets most want. Lots of small triangles to accurately show the precise shape of things of digitally-created parts. Nothing about MAJC-5200 will strengthen Sun's penetration into new SGI markets per se. That'd be dependent on some other, presumably fill-rate enhancing, technology.
--LP
With some highly specialized systems they might've managed to up that a bit, but your average system is limited to 4 gb.
-
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.
Where do they claim that? According to the SPECcpu website, a 1.05 GHz SPARC III Cu gets 537 base SPECint and 701 SPECfp, while a 2.2 GHz P4 easily beats it with 790 SPECint and 779 SPECfp.
Intel is way ahead in integer, and although the Sun catches up somewhat in FP, if you look at the individual results, it's entirely due to one massive spike on the art test. They recently figured out a (controversial) compiler trick that gave them nearly an order of magnitude increase on that one SPECfp test, and doubled their overall SPECfp score. Sun are known for their stability & scalability, but not their CPU speed.
Of course, if you have 106 of the things, that's different. But you'll be paying over US$4M for it, which isn't exactly workstation class anymore.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Hmm, Sun made a new computer. Doesnt this entire article belong in that little 468x60 iframe at the top of the page?
Liberty in your lifetime
If you're willing to spend the money to get the speed, the nVidia Quadro4 900XGL is the current SPECviewperf record holder, supports two displays (2048x1536 each, better than the XVR's dual 1280x1024), and costs well under half the XVR-1000. It also supports stereo viewing and a programmable vertex & pixel pipeline.
True, its DACs are 24 bits instead of 30 bits (SGI workstations are still the go there, with 36 bit RGB DACs), but the NV30 may change that. It also does multisampled anti-aliasing (currently 9-tap 4-sample, though older drivers did offer a 16-sample mode too).
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I want one of these to replace my Matrox G400 Dual Head MAX card. :~(
/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. . . .)
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
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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> There are people who do visualisation who care about this stuff. As for the color, does anyone know if you can actually see any difference there ? I mean - 24 bit color is 16M colors ?
Yes, 24 Bit color is 16M colors, but that is *inadequate* when you start talking about color gradients. 24-bit color has 3 color channels, each with 8-bit depth. That allows for 256 shades of *primary colors*, but the eye can detect millions of shades. A higher color bit depth has less banding issues.
This is a ludicrous comparison because they are not specifying WHAT is being done to test these systems.
Sun systems, particularly those with the UltraSparc III processors, will blow away any other type of hardware architecture for floating point calculations in processor-intensive applications that are written for the UltraSparc III chipset. This has been proven time and time and time again; however, the tests that most of the press runs are basic mathematical or graphical tests in a "one size fits all" fashion which is GROSSLY unfair to Sun.
I recently worked with a major electrical components company that was trying to compare the SunBlade 1000 at 950 MHz with newer 1.8 GHz PCs. Their results ended up with roughly the same results; however, the Sun still eked out as being slightly faster. But even the people who ran the test said that it was not a fair comparison because the application was designed and compiled for the SuperSparc and HyperSparc line of processors!
So here was a SunBlade 1000 @ 950 Mhz running an old, archaic 8-bit application that still ended up being faster than a 1.8 GHz Intel Xeon system running the same application for a 32-bit Windows app. If the application was compiled to take adantage of the USIII's architecture, it would have blown away the Xeon machine like an Indy car to a Yugo.
I'll never forget the day that the idiots at Dell ran a full-page advertisement comparing their newest server to the Sun E450 and bragging about how much faster it was. You know what they used to test? An OpenGL clocking machanism with Dell having the newest video card while giving the E450 a measly Creator 3D. Oh, yeah. That's fairness in testing.
Sun will never EVER get a balanced speed review in the media because pratcially all tests use a generic "one size fits all" method of testing.
NEWS FLASH! The Sun Blade line was never meant to suit all, so generic tests that are run on a Sun Blade can not and should not be taken at face value.
3DRAM has been around 4-5 years or so. It is nice technology, but to answer your rhetorical question, adding logic operations to memory adds significantly to the expense of the RAM. (It's a non-commodity part made by Mitsubishi, and at the very least must be tested, and I think manufactured, in custom ways.)
It also reduces memory flexibility; you can't just take some of that huge texture memory you have and start using it as the frame+Z buffer of a dual-head display for example, unless the right amount of 3D RAM was spec'ed in the hardware design to begin with.
Also, at least in the early days, some blending modes were supported and others weren't.
Reducing Z buffer bandwidth is pretty nice though, don't get me wrong. But most of the industry has stuck with the volume economics of more conventional RAM types.
--LP
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.
Simple example; apply to any scientific field you can think of.
Open a big matrix of size 20,000x20,000. Keeping each element as 1 byte, this will take you 4GB of memory. 32 bit systems can't handle this much memory for one process. You need a 64-bit system with lots of physical memory.
Looks like the two may be comparable. The Fuel costs about $11,000 for a R14K 600 model. I think that the Fuels v12 graphics may have the edge here, but for slightly lower end stuff, I can see companies going with Sun (We know they'll be around in 5 years) instead of SGI for some of their MCAD stuff.
You will also find that most of the work going into intel/amd cpu`s is actually aimed at spec benchmarks, whereas the sun hardware is designed to actually be used for real world tasks, and to perform those tasks reliably.
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What Sun gives you is a bit more performance per processor, or a bit more performance per multiprocessor box. But that is not usually a compelling argument, since big computations are usually distributed anyway, and it's still cheaper to build a 200 processor Beowulf cluster than to buy a 100 processor SPARC box. (The Beowulf probably also gives you better I/O and memory bandwidth overall.)
64bit processing is not compelling enough to cause a lot of people to switch. With cheap memory, that will change over the next couple of years, but then AMD and Intel will have mature 64bit offerings.
Sorry, but Sun has been steadily going downhill. They just don't have much of a market anymore.
No, I'm saying that it would be extremely difficult to implement an out-of-order superscalar execution engine when your operations are not simple.
I am saying the instruction set architectures (ISAs) don't effect the internal micro-architecture like they used to because we've figured out how to do translation for typical CISC ISAs. Of course doing this translation will cost you in silicon area.
Nope... Xeons have 32bit address + 4bit segment. You are still limited to 4GB per processes, you can have several 4GB processes though. But they are not in same memory space. the 36bit is just a hack....
Offtopic? Huh? How about I mention how evil the DMCA and SSSCA are and that Micro$oft sucks! Linux roolz!
Actually, our Linux Beowulf cluster is in our machine room, next to a (now unused and defunct) Sun Enterprise server.
What was the size of your spice file? We did the same test, and intel is faster for small device files. For large design files it just chokes...
and if you count the cost of your time porting the software does it still work out cheaper? Add on the debugging time for a new platform and so forth.
It's all grand and dandy looking at the hardware costs alone but the people buying these boxes have more to worry about than a few thousand dollars in hardware costs.
The "Non-Stop" line is interesting though. This is the old Tandem product line. Tandem specialized in systems that never went down -- even if some of the hardware was broken. Not that impressive nowadays, but Tandem dominated the field 20 years ago. After the '89 quake, Tandem got a service call from a bank whose mainframe server had been knocked over by the first shock -- but was still running. So please tell us, how do we bring it back upright without shutting it down?