Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Sun Solaris Vs Linux: The x86 Smack-down

Posted by Hemos on from the battle-to-the-finish dept.

JigSaw writes "Tony Bourke put together a long article, benchmarking File System, System, Compilation, OpenSSL and Web Performance for both Linux and Solaris on x86 hardware. While SPARC's Solaris is said to be more optimized than its x86 counterpart on the other hand so is Linux 2.6 compared to 2.4. Solaris-x86 performed well in the tests, but Linux 2.4 seems to win most of the tests and the overall impressions."

1 of 320 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Sun on x86 by n3rd · · Score: 4, Informative

    Was Sun really serious about Solaris on x86?

    On and off, evidently back on again. I've heard that back in the mid 90's a decent amount of customers used Solaris x86 on Compaq's. After a while they dropped support and over the next few years. Anyone confirm or deny (I know the second part is true)?

    Here is a recent press release about Solaris x86. Disregard the marketing garbage, there's a lot of it.

    They name a decent amount of customers, a biomedical place is one of them. Perhaps a transition from SPARC to x86 for sheer speed would be cheaping going from Solaris to Solaris instead of Solaris to Linux, that is assuming Solaris on x86 meets their needs.

    Also, according to this article they have Solaris x86 for Opteron. Perhaps this would help convince big graphics apps such as Photoshop make a port to Opteron since Linux and the BSD's are already there.

    They also have a POWER4+'esqe chip coming out in the first half of the new year. Two UltraSPARC III cores with 8 megs of cache and each running at 1.2 GHz each.

    Sun has good things going for them but they need to expand into new areas and take another look at the current situation.