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Sun's new UltraSPARC workstation: the Blade 1500
Roman Hauptmann writes "Here's a review of Sun's newest single-CPU workstation based on the UltraSPARC IIIi processor. According to the review, the system barely performs on the level of a P4 1.8ghz machine yet it sells for several times the price. Despite that, the Blade series still brings value to those who do visualization and imaging."
Another 'insightful' comment from someone who is too lazy to read...
If you already use proprietary UNIX-based software, put simply, the Blade 1500 allows you get more work done. With roughly twice the processing power of the Blade 150 and the 3D capabilities of the Wildcat4-powered XVR-600 graphics adapter, the amount of time you'll save in industrial applications is well worth the initial cost of the machine. The SunPCI adds an incredible amount of value, allowing you to run Windows applications on the same machine with the ability to easily transfer files to Solaris.
Yes, and I have one. It runs Windows 9x pretty well. Apple has a page about it.
-- thalakan
Why are they using an obsolete OS version?
Why not at least install Solaris 9?
ver 9 has been out long enough!
this just doesn't make sense.
as for performance, I have an ultra-10 here with 128mb of ram, 300mhz cpu, with aurora linux 1.0 and it out-performs a p4/1.6ghz system (for compiling software)...
just weird...
Also newer Amiga's have PCI slots, Amiga 1200 Towers have PCI slots and drivers for normal PC based hardware. But Sun's PC card does work rather well, and if you have to use windows, its a nice option.
I have a sunblade 100 on my desk, upgraded from an Ultra (dont know if I would call it an upgrade...) But I was only using it for xwindows and running screen on it. Finally decided to put SuSE on it, but the version was getting old, and Suse dropped Sparc. I threw Gentoo Sparc on it the other day, even went in testing source portage, and put every application I wanted. Even had the updated Opera browser. Runs rather well, even upgraded to 2.6.1.
5 years ago, most of my admin utilities where Solaris based, Then they moved to Web-based, Java and linux. I don't really need a solaris box anymore, even to administor solaris applications.
Our NOC uses sun stations all day, with citrix for windows software. They need to have 3 monitors running X, so they can have multiple terminals and applications open. Have to admit, Sun with CDE might look fugly, its the most stable OS/GUI around. And when you can't afford to crash with that much data open, Sun Unix on Sun Hardware is rock solid.
But other than a Network Operation Centers, or very specialized applications(are there any?), why would you use this as a desktop replacement? Seems a rather small market.
Have you really tried to spec a server with a high ratio of RAM to CPU, like a 4 way with 64GB. SUN won't sell it to you, you have to buy 8 CPUs. Yes, you can do 8GB/CPU in a SUN box but for large memory (large VM size, small working set) applications like some databases you end up buying unnecessary CPUs. Itanium and Opteron will force SUN to change (open up) its hardware configurations and make them more flexible.
Actually you are wrong, very wrong, and I have the data to prove it. I design chips, for a living, and we have both Sun 4800 servers (8 processors, 1Ghz each, 32 Gig of RAM) and compared to a Xeon 2Ghz ( or higher, can't remember exactly) running Red Hat, with the same IC software, the Linux machines outperform the Sun by almost 3 to 1 on some things and even higher for most other things. The machines never crash, and I am pushing through very large chip designs.
When it comes down to it, Chip design uses lots of memory and CPU power (and disk space), and if I am seeing most of the chip industry switching over to Linux on x86 (Intel and AMD), you can bet your ass that sun isn't feeling to happy.
It is not more effecient, I don't know where you get that from. But if you do have data, please share, as I'd be interested to see it. Our budget for the new year includes 10 new dual processor machines and no suns, and did I mention I work for Cadence.
My research group got a nice Sun Blade 2000 with dual UltraSPARC III+ (basically UltraSPARC III with coppper interconnects).
I wrote a computational scientific program in Matlab for my research group. I then tested it out on the Sun Blade and my own P4 3.06 GHz w/ HT laptop. The Sun Blade computed at nearly 3X the speed of the Pentium 4. Now we are wondering why we didn't just buy a nice custom built PC for 1/3 the price...
I also realize Matlab runs poorly on Unix due to FP instruction sets not being available. Still I've tested Ansofts HFSS as well with similar results.
Where the Music Matters
At work we buy Sun hardware because it's probably the most reliable hardware you can buy.
However, lately, we've been having trouble justifying the costs. A cheap linux box will get the job done, even if we need to have cheap backups around for any hardware failures.
No, XEROX PARC did it first and Apple copied them.
Second, the reason why Sun licensed from XEROX is called "indemnification" (sp?). Same reason Sun licensed from SCO. Sun has many big, important customers that have better things to do than worry about silly things like lawsuits. So Sun does all the worrying and you pay extra so you don't have to.
Banks, telcos and insurance companies cannot have things break. By law. If things break bad things happen. People can die. This is why pay more and make sure things work properly otherwise you can put people's lives at stake.
*That's* why you buy Sun (or IBM mainframes, or other big "proprietary" machines).
Not Solaris 9, nor Linux.
But the real question is... Could a SunPCI card installed in a Linux 2.6 x86 machine be incorporated into a NUMA subarchitecture?
I don't think this review can give us any idea about *real* performance of this workstation. Author just didn't manage to run any real benchmarks at all, exept some Java-based benchmark, which isn't very suitable to benchmark machines with different architectures. So i don't think it's fair to make statement about "the system which barely performs on the level of a P4 1.8ghz machine yet it sells for several times the price"
In the old days that was all true. It's less so now. Particularly with models like this one. Linux and *BSD have progressed to the point they're better for most purposes than Solaris. And the new low end Suns give up most of the advantages Sun machines traditionally hold. This one, for example, has less I/O bandwidth than many Intel boxes, can't take huge amounts of memory, uses a cheap IDE hard drive, doesn't support multiple processors, etc. I wouldn't bet on it lasting forever like old Sun boxes do either, though that's just a guess. But if you look at Suns low end offerings, they definately seem to be cheap.
There are still good reasons to go with something besides x86 architecture, to be sure. But I'd have to say that IBM and Apple look like better bets than Sun these days.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
To shrug off this system based solely on performance is to ignore the most important aspect of this system and others like it: RELIABILITY.
Exactly.
These machines are not sold to home users.
Sun's hardware performance has sucked for a very long time but thats not what they sell, they sell Reliability.
Those CPUs have been tested a LOT more than Intel CPUs.
I remember the UltraSparc2 which had 1 known bug a year before shipping. The Pentium 3 at *shipping* had 60 known bugs. That is what you pay for.
To the people who buy these things $5,000 is pocket change, the software will cost many times the price of the hardware and as such the extra will be well worth it.
The reviewer is a brand whore:
The 16x DVD drive is made by Lite-On, which, like Seagate with the IDE hard drive, is not exactly industry-reknowned for making top-quality optical drives. I'd rather see Sony or some other more reliable OEM vendor in a workstation like this.
It is widely known that the 16x Lite-On DVD drive is one of -the- best feature wise and quality. Ask any rippers what they use (and not just for its sheer speed).
I've had a 16x DVD by Sony I've had to have replaced a few times within the first year. I like Sony CRTs (no longer produced) and think they are amazing but Sony quality is not that great anymore in general (their sound systems never were).
Lite-On is the best DVD-ROM producer just a known fact.
That's exactly right. Sun just wants customers with Blade 100 and 150 machines to retire them and move up to the 1500. It's twice as fast and will slip right into the same environment that the 100/150 was running in.
What they don't want is for you to compare the 1500 vs. a HP XW6000 or similar offering from Dell or IBM. Because if you did you'd see the x86 box is anywhere from 2 to 5 times faster for most workloads, cheaper, and comes with a 3 year parts and labor warrenty (no expensive Sun contract needed).
Of course you then have to go through the trouble of setting up Linux versions of your applications (and perhaps pressure your vendors into commercializing their Linux ports if they haven't already), and deal with integrating the Linux machines into your network (choose a desktop you can manage easily for all your users, watch out for NFS/automount pitfalls, figure out how you're going to do workstation builds/deployments, etc). Not a problem if you have the right Linux skills inhouse.
But clearly, Sun must be hoping most of their customers take the less painful path and just fork over more money for less performance.
-cjs
-cjs
Nice idea in theory but unless they're prepared to wait for nearly ten years like HP did for Merced/Itanium then they would have to pick something already out there which leaves them with, uhh, Itanium and IBM. The first is an also ran strategy (which granted is better than thy're doing right now) and the second is just a proxy for shuttering the hardware side of the house anyway. Sun's hope as a hardware company lies in Fujitsu/Siemens who themselves are also keeping a foot in the Itanium camp.
I know that many of the applications that we use for design, simulation and testing mostly run on Suns, but the vendors are quickly moving to Linux and we are more than willing to accept it. Why? Because a 3.2GHz P4 512k (Extreme Edition is next on the shopping list) with 512MB really does perform many times faster than something like a SunFire 280R cpu against cpu, and for many times less money!! It is only once you start getting into the need for 8GB of memory or dozens of cpu that you want to start looking at Sun for bang per buck.
I have always believed in UNIX on the back end, but it just doesn't pay to stick with Sun anymore. More and more, Linux and some form of RedHat (or whatever the vendors support) will take the place of the Suns.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
We were going to spend $15K about 3 years ago to upgrade an ailing E450 to max out proc and memory. We were supporting multiuser MATLAB/Simulink .
Instead, we threw that money at 6 dual Athlon XPs.
In 3 months, the E450 was only being used to run distributed.net. If a single box was given 2 jobs, it could complete them 225% faster than the Sun, and in the worse case, 150% faster in a contrived memory constrained situation.
Multiply by 6 and we easily more than tripled the capacity, while reducing overhead costs/maintenance.
Sigh. Sun was pissed at us too. We did this a number of times. PC hardware (if you make good choices) has caught up. What are you going to do?
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
My instruction mix is integer-heavy, I'm sure if it was more FP then it wouldn't be so slanted but from what I've seen even the FP edge has slipped away.
I highly doubt that. I remember when the Pentium 3 sling shot past the DEC ALpha in floating point/$. Honestly I haven't seen serious purchasing/usage of Sun equipment in physics for years and years. Most purchasing is replacement and diehards with excess cash. I see more new clusters made with Apples (I.E. not too many)!
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
Users of EDA software care about performance. Time to market is EVERYTHING the highly competitive ASIC markets. Just about everybody is moving to x86 due to it's superior performance - The 64-bit x86 chips from AMD are only going to accelerate this move.
You'd expect someone reviewing a computer to have at least a vague clue about that computer...unfortunately life doesn't always live up to expectations.
Following on from...
All very nice. Except that the UltraSPARC is not a proprietary 64-bit system! The SPARC series of chips are developed by SPARC, in whom Sun have a relatively large stake. Such chips include the Leon2, the designs for which are available under the conditions of the Lesser GPL. This is not a proprietary architecture! Want to make your own SPARC chip? Download the SPARC definitions and get to it! No-one's going to stop you, this is after all an open system!
OK, so there's one thing in there that does make the Blade workstation proprietary, and that's the IA-32 compliant processor on the hardware PC emulator. That's a closed-license design, not nice and open and standards-compliant like the SPARCs are.
Even linux is better.
"Even" Linux? Good *God*, man. Debian had things down to "apt-get update;apt-get upgrade;", and Red Hat is down to "yum update". How little typing (or few characters for your cron job) do you *need* before you're happy?
I admit that if you install a new kernel, you're going to have to reboot the machine to start taking advantage of it.
Last, what the hell is it with your cheap ass sales people. Is the sun logo so expensive that you can't afford to give out tshirts, cups and other good will crap to your biggest customers. Pizza?!? WTF! HP gave the whole department some of the best vendor shirts we've ever had. IBM gets us drinks and cigars. EMC tooks us to the matrix the day BEFORE it opened. I can go on and on. Instead, as one of your biggest clients in the region we get bad pizza and bad patches?!?
I wasn't aware that business types expected bribes these days. Perhaps I'm just naive. Christ, you folks expect kickbacks in the form of Matrix opening tickets in order to do business with someone? I was pretty disgusted with the whole Olympic committee thing, but this is downright pervasive.
May we never see th
Here! Here!
Well, on the case of the patch problem. One of the Solaris strategy people was at a recent technology update day I attended. When I brought up the patch issue he sighed and agreed how terrible it was. He said things were going to improve but probably not to the degree he or I would like, mostly due to the big customers having the patchadd stuff entrenched. Hey-ho!
There IS a new patching tool available now from SunSolve but it's not exactly the bee's knees.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
Maybe in 1995 they were better as far as memory bandwidth, not anymore. They use standard PC components with the exception of the mobo and processor. The only reason they have good transfer time is they use Fibre channel hard drives in their higher end systems. This computer (Blade 1500 uses IDE). Hell all you need to do is read the specs:
1 GHz UltraSPARC III, 1GB DDR 266MHz RAM, 80 GB IDE Hard Drive, DVD, Solaris 8 (Installed, to get the CD's it's $100 more!). All for $3995.
If you want an excellent Unix on a 64bit processor I suggest this:
Dual 1.8GHz PPC970, 1GB DDR400 RAM, 160GB SATA Hard Drive, CDRW/DVD, Mac OS X 10.3 (I added a 20" Cinema Display and 3 year AppleCare to get it closer in price). All for $4068.
My guess is a Dual 1.8GHz 64bit processor with a faster hard drive and memory channel would be significantly faster. But what do I know, just a guess on my part.