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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."
Look at the main page of the site that's linked. Pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft and Sun articles all over.
Who would have thought there would be a negative review?
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.
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.
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.
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
That's your biggest argument over SPARC hardware versus x86? For fuck's sake, what are you doing with your precious SPARC workstation that you use console mode for anything? Wow, you must really need all that awesome graphics power and crossbar architecture to perform workstation tasks in console mode! So fucking what...if your biggest problem is the attractiveness of the font in console mode, then run your PC through a console framebuffer driver then. Fuckwit.
Face it, Sparcs win on the "total package" level. PCs win on the "play around as a hobby" level.
Add to the PCs "totally fucking destroying SPARC workstations for computationally heavy tasks". If I wanted a totally integrated hardware/software package, I'd buy a Macintosh. Sun can't touch Apple for total seamless integration.
You're a dying breed, and Sun can only sell so much slapped together underperforming shit to graybeard 'old-skool' UNIX sysadmins and engineers such as yourself. In fact, not enough to stay profitable. I see a Linux workstation in your future. Fuck off and die.
Just thought you should know, so you don't look like an asshole.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE