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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)

12 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 Dog-Cow · · Score: 5, Informative

      Ford Motor owns about 7000 Suns, and still buys them. PCs just don't have the applications that CAD/CAM desisgners need to get real work done. There are some big software packages ported to Windows, like I-DEAS, Unigraphics, and Catia, but the whole workflow and ancillary apps are non-existant.

    2. Re:What are these still used for? by afidel · · Score: 4, Informative

      Well we have a number of older Sunblades (1000's) and Ultra 60's (also workstation class) that we use for chip design. When trying to route some of our bigger asic's we use all 8GB's of ram in the 1000's. Show me an Intel workstsation that can handle 8GB of ram. Since these runs typically take days having even a single crash is unacceptable, and yes I know about checkpointing but afaik the tools from the chip factories don't do it, and even if they did that's a lame answer. For the most part it's about stability, and memory addressing not about raw cpu power (though since the jobs take days more cpu power is always apreciated =)

      --
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    3. Re:What are these still used for? by larien · · Score: 4, Informative
      Well, we've (i.e. an oil company) recently bought over 70 Sunblade 1000s for use in oil/gas exploration. Currently, there are a lot of applications which require the graphics throughput provided by Elite3d/Expert3d cards backed up by dual 64-bit CPUs which a wintel solution can't provide due to various factors, not least of which is bus bandwidth. Note that these cards use UPA slots, not PCI or AGP and most high-end Unix workstations come with 64-bit PCI which is much less common in the Intel based world (yes, I know they exist, but...).

      As for raw compute performance, if you believe Sun's SPEC ratings from their product site, a 1.05GHz SPARC CPU is only just lagging behind an Intel 2.2GHz PIV on integer performance and beating it on FP. As FP is what drive 90% of scientific applications, Intel hasn't got the SPARC beaten yet by a long shot (especially since you can get a 106-way SPARC box, but Intel is limited to 32-way last I heard).

      It's probably also worth noting that list price is rarely what a company will end up paying.

    4. Re:What are these still used for? by Dirk+Pitt · · Score: 5, Informative
      This is true. And SGI certainly doesn't even have a large share of the MCAD market. Mostly Sun and HP/UX. SGI is a valid option, but doesn't touch the other two in terms of performance.

      As for PCs, NOBODY's doing large model work on them. Small shops might use them because they're economical, but no one would use a PC to work with multi-thousand surface/100k+ element geometry/FEM. Perhaps this is a Windows limitation, not hardware architecture; it's hard to tell because most of the big 4 (Catia/ProE/Unigraphics/Ideas) don't have a Linux port yet, AFAIK.

  2. Direct link by ChrisRijk · · Score: 4, Informative

    Direct link to the post as a stand-alone page.

  3. Great Price too by CodeMonky · · Score: 5, Funny

    and at only $11K its a steal.

    Or rather, thats the only way I'm getting one, theft.

    --
    --"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
  4. 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.

  5. 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'
  6. Re:Sunblade line is very poor by Zapman · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    See:
    http://www.sun.com/desktop/sunblade2000/de tails.ht ml
    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
  7. Re:Sun's in trouble by Hiro+Antagonist · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 .sig.
  8. 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.