Slashdot Mirror


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."

4 of 516 comments (clear)

  1. Re:80GB Seagate drive? by grahamsz · · Score: 0, Troll

    That's for your OS and software.

    Surely if you are doing any high end visualization then you'd hook a T3 up with fibrechannel. Of course the blade will give you a 66MHz 64-bit PCI slot which should let you shift over 500 megabytes a second.

  2. Re:Brings value? by Lord_Slepnir · · Score: 0, Troll
    $2500 for the Mac\

    I ran through a similar system at dell.com (3.06 GHZ, 5112 MB of RAM, top of the line video card) and the whole thing came in at under $2000. There are a lot of things that Apple does better, but price / performance ratio is not of of them.

  3. Re:Brings value? by cehardin · · Score: 1, Troll

    Dude, you did it wrong. If you compare a dell dual Xeon to a apple dual G5 you will see the G5 is actually cheaper.

    The only catch is that you are comparing 2GHz G5s to 3.06MHz Xeons. The Dell will be more expensive, performance will be about the same, however.

  4. Re:90%? by router · · Score: 0, Troll

    Yeah, uh, explain exactly what Solaris is good for? Hardware is over 5 grand, its slower than last year's PC, it has essentially the same external hardware (harddrive, video, etc). Are you seriously suggesting that this computer, as reviewed, is faster, more stable, or more reliable than a Linux workstation with the same or better video card, dual opterons, 2-4x the RAM, and raid 0 (!)? Which would end up being cheaper. Oh, and if you need software support, put RHEL WS/ES on it, and get name brand support.

    Sun hardware hasn't been more reliable since at least the ultrasparc II age, and the OS is no picnic either. Any OS that spontaneously reboots when a non-system filesystem fills up is not robust, sorry to say.

    andy