Slashdot Mirror
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)
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-860701.html
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?
Direct link to the post as a stand-alone page.
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.
The 100 line has US II processors, not US III. Not that the US III beats an athlon in raw performance, but complaining that an SB 100 isn't as fast is just plain silly.
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.
As for the color, does anyone know if you can actually see any difference there ? I mean - 24 bit color is 16M colors ?
It's not about the number of colors, or whether you can see the difference. You want more bits of color precision for handling multiple lighting/shading/blending/etc. ops that happen throughout the rendering pipe, before the end result's precision is scaled down and displayed.
For example, when adding more and more lights to a scene, you will eventually start clipping against those 24 bits of precision.
I'd like to see 128 bpp internal rendering pipes and 128 bit Z buffers. It would take a lot to exhaust that kind of precision.
Be careful. Even though they have the same name, there is a wide difference between even a 'blade 100 and a 'blade 1000, let alone the 2000.
e tails.ht ml
See:
http://www.sun.com/desktop/sunblade2000/d
for more details.
Summary:
Sunblade 100:
USIIe chip, runs at 500mhz., up to 2 gig ram, 2x 20g HD.
Blade 1000:
1 or 2x USIII chip, runs at 750MHz or 900MHz. Up to 8 gig ram, and either 36 or 73 gig disks (1 or 2)
Blade 2000:
1 or 2x USIII chips, runs at 900MHz, or 1.05 GHz. Up to 8 gig ram, and 2x 73 gig FC-AL disks (fiber connected disks)
And that graphics card kicks butt. You can put up to two of them in a blade 1000 or 2000, letting you drive 4 displays.
Zapman
Sun still has some customers in the 2D publishing space, who might use images scanned in or color-corrected with greater bit-depth precision.
And theoretically, texturing-intensive entertaiment applications could use it for better results when blending multiple textures. But practically, fill rate is probably not strong enough for those guys to buy the XVR-1000.
Basically, I think it's a penis-comparison match versus PC graphics. "My color depth is bigger than yours." Which Sun hopes will justify the higher price.
It may hit a few niches, but its mostly irrelevant.
--LP, who no longer knows the 3D gory details but still faintly remembers where the bodies are buried
Very interresting If they Pull it out.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
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).
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
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
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
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"?
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.