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Non x-86/Mac-PPC Workstations?

Posted by Cliff on from the looking-for-a-different-kind-of-animal dept.

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?"

2 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. Why? by crow · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sure, you can get MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, StrongARM, or something even more esoteric, but what's the point? You'll end up running the same code, just compiled to a different processor. Despite the technical shortcomings of the X86, the processor can still run anything you can compile. Sure there are annoying BIOS issues. But when you come down to running real code, even most of the kernel code, it doesn't matter one bit what processor you have.

  2. Why? by sethgecko · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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?

    --
    Be ot or bot ne ot, taht is the nestquoi.