Non x-86/Mac-PPC Workstations?

Aknaton asks: "As I begin to plan for my annual fall purchase of new hardware, I would like to try something different. I have already owned several PPC Macs running MacOS X and many PCs but they still leave me wanting more. I have begun looking for non-Apple/X86 alternatives but I am not finding much. SGI still makes machines but they don't even list prices. Sun offers the SunBlade 100, for just under a grand and it is a consideration. Can anyone else suggest, or know of, any other options? Or is it just a PC world after all?"

Comments

Why?

[sethgecko]

I have already owned several PPC Macs running MacOS X and many PCs but they still leave me wanting more.

What leaves you wanting? The OS choices? The processor architectures? Gui's available? Ability to talk to the BIOS via serial console? The coolness factor (hey, look at me, I run an AS/400 in my basement!)...

Do you just want to be different?

It's impossible to even begin answering your question without knowing why you're dissatisfied with x86/PPC...

I'm writing this from a Mac running OS X, which is sitting next to my OS 9 box for photoshop, which is next to my 2 x86 linux boxes for playing quake. My home directory is shared to all via NFS from my x86 freebsd box, which sits on the rack next to an *old* HP-PA box running HP-UX since that's what we run at work, and 2 sparcs running Solaris serving up web pages for no reason other than that Solaris is kewl. Any one of these can do pretty much everything any of the others can do (except for the HP. 80Mhz PA-Risc just don't cut it...)

Now what, exactly, did you want your workstation to do that it doesn't do now?

Why Not?

[GreenHell]

There's no real answer. It's just sort of a thing that's particular to a sub-set of geeks: The desire to have as many different architectures running as possible. It's one of those things like people who collect stuff (stamps, cards, 1st edition books, etc), if you have to ask 'Why?' you're obviously not in that group and it's likely you never will be.

Re:Why?

[walt-sjc]

I have to say "ditto" here.

The basic reason you don't see much else out there is "economics." It's VERY f-ing expensive to put out a new architecture, especially with all the issue associated with the modern bus speeds. Not to mention the software costs to support all the needed interfaces such as usb, scsi, firewire, video, audio, etc. Is your box going to be PCI? Sbus? What about third party support?

All the "specialized" processor architectures are dying. All you have to do is look at the workstation market of HP, SGI, & sun. Their sales drop every year (servers are a different story, but percent market share of intel-based boxes is still climbing.)

Is MUCH more cost effective to go with a fairly standardized architecture that has multiple vendor support, a huge code-base, etc.

Bang for buck you can't beat an x86 box. Period. We will see what the 64 bit market holds in a couple years, but it's probably going to be AMD / Intel ish...

So yeah, the intel PC architecture sucks. Interrupt conflicts, legacy ports, god-aweful bios architecture, real / protected mode - blech.
We can only hope that Hammer / Itanium / etc fixes some of this and doesn't retain the crap "just because it's easier."

Tight budget?

[Otter]

SGI still makes machines but they don't even list prices. Sun offers the SunBlade 100, for just under a grand and it is a consideration.

So....you're looking to buy hardware for which you have no need or use, but you're concerned about the price?

My suggestion is to browse the vintage computer auctions at eBay. You'll get the same amount of value for it, and it'll be a lot cheaper.

Re:Go for a used Sun

[pmz]

the Ultra 2s rather suck

Why? They are really well engineered and are solid workhorses. They really aren't expensive, either (unless you buy directly from Sun). Also, an Ultra 2 is a much better workstation than an Ultra 5 or 10, unless you really need a PCI bus.

An Ultra 60, while sounding considerably more impressive than the modest 10, isn't worth much more than a 10 unless it has either the Elite 3D graphics card or dual processors

Ultra 60s come with dual-channel UltraSCSI controllers, 4MB cache per CPU, and dual UPA framebuffer slots. Ultra 10s have IDE disks and 2MB cache per CPU. The Ultra 60 also has the CPUs mounted on their own daughter cards, which makes it considerably more flexible than the Ultra 10. They really are different beasts.

Re:Why?

[pmz]

Unsupported? The collective experience among people who purchase and employ Sun workstations, for example, speaks for itself. In my office, 7-year-old Sun workstations are still useful, are still upgradable, and they are as predictable as night following day. Meanwhile, the 7-year-old PCs...wait a minute...where are they?

The RISC-based hardware by folks like Sun, IBM, SGI, HP, whatever is a real investment. In a hard-working business, their flexibility and durability pays both in time saved and frustration saved. I'm not making this up, believe me!

Used SGIs for the high-quality user experience

[daviddennis]

Used SGI systems are still fantastic computers, and they're amazingly cheap due to the sad decline of the company. I have an Indigo2 R10000 system that I bought about six months ago for $400 (not including monitor since I already had a SGI monitor). Now you can get an Octane for less then $1,000.

SGI's main distinction aside from cool case designs is Irix, their Unix-based OS. And the main advantage of Irix is that the user interface is still superior to anything else out there, with the possible exception of Apple. Sun's efforts in this direction were so anemic that they are now switching to Gnome, the same design you'll see under Linux.

The biggest disadvantage is that you have to beg, borrow or steal the C compiler, which is not free. I've found that most resellers will sneak it on for you if you ask them nicely enough.

If you don't want to do that, you have to install GCC, which can be an amazing pain.

My Indigo2 is solid as a rock and hasn't given me a minute of trouble since I bought it. Very cool.

Greg Douglas of Reputable.com is a great guy, or you can cheap out with eBay.

This all being said, the Mac running MacOS X is such a compelling option nowadays that it's difficult to ignore. If you want a system you can run Photoshop on AND use as a Unix box, MacOS X is what you really need.

I run both MacOS X and SGI and love them for what I need them for. Certainly I greatly prefer either to Linux, ans as for Windows, well, let's not go there :-).

D

Re:Why?

[ninewands]

Two words ... reliability and support.

I'm an admin in a mixed-platform Unix environment at a university (which means I work with machines that a lot of folks would consider 'legacy').

I admin Solaris (both SPARC and x86) Tru64 on the Alpha, Irix and Linux. The SPARC, Alpha, and MIPS boxen just DON'T go down barring a power outage or a hard drive failure, which can and will happen on ANY architecture.

I work on machines that are older than some Slashdot posters as well as some of the latest and greatest. Buying a RISC box is a long-term investment and the vendors treat it as such. At present, Sun is still issuing bugfix and security patches for Solaris 2.5, even though it's almost six years old. I have tied up multiple Sun support Engineers for hours on end trying to solve a hardware compatibility problem involving a SunPCI card. You just don't get that kind of service on the x86/PPC architectures.

Re:Yeah but...

[ksheff]

The Indy provided a relatively cheap way to provide programmers a machine that they could use to create applications for other SGI models. One could develop and test gl programs w/o having to stand in line for access to a more powerful machine. All the *nix vendors have or had something similar for pretty much the same reasons.