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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."
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.
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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.
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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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.
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?
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