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."

Comments

For The Think Tank

[secondvertigo]

The great selling point of a Sun is that it seemes to maintain a "cool" factor much like Apple computers, not mass produced generic clones like Dell etc... whether that alone or with certain small scale contributions to server innovation is enough is unclear, other than that, I'll be ordering them for the next college term

Thanks

I'll post a more descriptive post when I've read up on the specs

Re:For The Think Tank

[Threni]

> not mass produced generic clones like Dell

He probably thinks evey Apples box is lovingly hand built by Steve Jobs. Mass produced just means `selling well`.

Re:For The Think Tank

[odyrithm]

what you mean to say there not?!?! next your be telling me Windows is programmed by monkeys..

Re:For The Think Tank

[secondvertigo]

If Windows was programmed by an infinite number of monkeys, they would turn up in Redmond, knock on Gates' door and say...

Here's Service Pack XP 3

Re:For The Think Tank

[AKAImBatman]

The great selling point of a Sun is that it seemes to maintain a "cool" factor much like Apple computers, not mass produced generic clones like Dell etc

No, the great selling point is that you don't have a hardware failure every 6 months like with Dell hardware. Dell hardware costs less, but you're getting what you pay for. Unfortunately, the CPU is actually the least of your worries. It's usually something like a disk controller or memory DIMMs. We had a RAID controller go on a Dell disk array and managed to corrupt the production database. Thankfully, not much had changed since the last backup. Still, that managed to defeat the entire purpose of a RAID array.

Re:For The Think Tank

[Paleomacus]

And your life is so great that you have the time to reply?

I was just trying to half-way politely correct someone. One in twenty of my posts is a correction of spelling or grammar. There are just some things that I find really irritating.

1. Similar irritants:
2. irregardless - it's just not a word and has no valid linguistic meaning
3. 'play it by year' - correctly: 'play it by ear', the first makes no sense

There are quite a few more but I think you get the idea. I don't correct people in public unless I'm very good friends with that person(even then rarely). I just figure here is a good place to occasionally correct people so that they might not sound uneducated in the real world. The way you speak _does_ make people think differently about you.

Re:For The Think Tank

[odyrithm]

The way you speak _does_ make people think differently about you

Slight error there, I was NOT speaking I was typing.. there is a difference.

An irrirant of mine is ignorance, you are full of it, you seem to presume my grammar and spelling should be perfect, well its not, and to add to it I dont spellcheck 100% of my posts, its a /. post not a thesis Im writing, and lastly Im dyslexic. But in your brain it seems, anyone that posts on /. with a mistype, bad punctuation or shitty grammar somehow should know better, wake up and relise this is the real world, no one is perfect.

Re:For The Think Tank

[Paleomacus]

Slight error there, I was NOT speaking I was typing.. there is a difference.

Purely symantics. The way I see it writing(even on slashdot) benefits from having 30 seconds of proofing applied before submission. No spelling or grammer checker would have caught the error you made(none that I've encountered that is).

I agree with your statement that I am ignorant. However you seem irrational. I never claimed that your spelling and grammar should be perfect(who is to determine perfection?) just that you might want to strive to improve yourself.

I believe knee-jerk defensiveness is a stronger sign of ignorance. I am far from perfect and can accept the errors I make. I also don't use my handicaps as excuse for anything.

But in your brain it seems, anyone that posts on /. with a mistype, bad punctuation or shitty grammar somehow should know better, wake up and relise this is the real world, no one is perfect.

This sentence is nonsense. I do realize this is the real world and the imperfection inherent. Somehow, I cannot find the place in my brain that you have retrieved these fascinating tid-bits.

I didn't correct you to pass any judgement.
I won't be responding to this thread further.

Re:For The Think Tank

[Anonymous Coward]

For many years Sun's low end machines (such as the Ultra 5, Ultra 10, and the Blade 150) have been all but PCs in name and CPU. Commodity hard drives, display adapters, optical drives, memory, network chips and expansion slots. And the quality of construction has been exceedingly average. There is no longer a difference between low-end Sun workstations and any PC manufactured by Dell, HP, IBM etc, except for price.

The days of Sun equipment being built like a tank and truly being something different to your run-of-the-mill PC are long gone, except for the high end workstations that cost as much as a car. Sun slaps together commodity junk like everyone else. They just rely on people like you to keep buying it unquestioningly. There's a lot in common between the die-hard Sun zealots and the typical Mac zealot, except Apple has actually produced something finally competitive with PCs at a somewhat reasonable price. Sun still hasn't figured that out.

Sure, if you're locked into Solaris for day to day workstation tasks and you can't afford one of Sun's 'real' workstations, you have my condolences. Take heart in the fact that it won't be much longer before the vendor of your app ports it to Linux/x86 or Windows (if they haven't already).

I look forward to the day when Sun has to bite the bullet and release an x86 workstation line just like they've done with their blade servers. Scott McNealy is as big a fuckwit as Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs could ever hope to be. Seeing him stand up there at the next Sun keynote and admit defeat to the 'clones' will be supremely satisfying.

Re:For The Think Tank

[SonOfThor]

Similar irritants:
irregardless - it's just not a word and has no valid linguistic meaning
'play it by year' - correctly: 'play it by ear', the first makes no sense

Heh.. Another one that really used to piss me off was: "...so it's really a mute point."

Hate that shit. It's the adult equivalent of "Valentimes day" and "Steel-belted radio tires"

Anyone else care to list some?

Re:For The Think Tank

[grahamlee]

The great selling point of a Sun is that it seemes to maintain a "cool" factor much like Apple computers

Looking around at either the stack of Ultras and SPARCStations by my right foot, or the Enterprise server and SunRays over thattaway, it's clear to me that the Sun selling point is not 'coolness' or prestige. You buy a Sun to get a UNIX system that's:

• Built like a tank
• Got full hardware support (i.e., it breaks, next day there's a new one on your desk) for five years
• Got full software support for five years
• Running the most rock-steady UNIX system around
• Did I mention the rather good support?

If all that is needed is a compute workstation on which some variety of free UNIX or Linux will run, then no the Sun workstation is not the most cost-effective option. However, you don't just buy a computer from Sun, you tend to get a full five-year support package as well. BTW on the subject of free UNIXen, interesting to note that for education, and possibly other purposes, the SOlaris source code is sometimes available :-).

Oh and Sun, FFS stop calling your workstations "blades" would you?

Re:For The Think Tank

[Ataru]

"Aluminum" is the US spelling. In the UK we write "aluminium".
"At this moment in time" is subtly different to "now". It gives the impression that at other moments in time, the asociated observation may not be the same. Perhaps it was not true in the past, it is true now, and one hopes it will continue to be true. English has many ways of saying similar things but in a subtly different way.

Re:For The Think Tank

[Paleomacus]

But I'm not Don't question my authority or put me in the dock Cozimnot!

Won't happen again.

Re:For The Think Tank

[TobiasSodergren]

Aaaww, isn't it sweet when love is in the air? ;)

Re:For The Think Tank

[haruchai]

Oh and Sun, FFS stop calling your workstations "blades" would you?

Especially since those workstations are hardly "cutting edge"

Re:For The Think Tank

[Jim_Maryland]

Have you actually sat down at a Sun Blade? For imagery/geospatial work, the Sun Blades easily out perform a MS Win32 PC configured similarly (sorry, I've not tried any of my applications on Linux as they aren't availble on that platform yet). I realize that a single workstation will not answer all problems, but a generic statement like workstations are hardly "cutting edge" is far from accurate.

Variety in the workstation market place will ultimately lead to better products for consumers and I'm all for that. Given that, does a Sun Blade make sense for all users? The simple answer is NO. Are they appropriate for those who have "REAL" high demands? YES.

The subject of other postings about Sun being dead are also without basis. The customers I support demand Sun hardware/OS about 70% of the time, with the remaining 30% still mostly other flavors of UNIX, and a "SMALL" percentage of that as MS Win32 products. The customers just don't trust MS Win32 systems yet and are unwilling to take on the high cost of administration (for the small percentage of MS Win32 systems we deliver, we almost always have to provide a SMS like solution to help manage the systems...just another added cost/complexity to keeping a MS Win32 environment).

I've managed a variety of UNIX flavors (Solaris/SunOS, DEC Ultrix, Alpha OSF, AIX, IRIX, RedHat), Novell, and MS Win32 (9x, NT, W2k, XP). All have their pros/cons, but Solaris appears to be the platform that gets the most vendor support. I don't think it's going away anytime real soon. That may change, especially as Linux matures and gains in real deployments. As odd as it sounds, I hope that none of the major OS/hardware vendors go under (although knocking MS down a notch or two wouldn't be bad). If we go to a mono-platform, the benefits of the current environment will be lost.

Jim

Re:For The Think Tank

[odyrithm]

I also don't use my handicaps as excuse for anything.

That is by far the most ignorant thing Ive heard you say. Lets say you get run down and paralyzed how would you see yourself? to lazy to walk?

Re:For The Think Tank

[Kent Recal]

Yes m'aam.
This I think has asociated observation in aluminum irregardless of it was plaid by year as a really mute point in time on a steel-belted radio tire.

Re:For The Think Tank

[Zebra_X]

Almost everyone who has posted something contrary to the parent has been modded down.

What the hell?

All I say is this, prove that sun is better than dell, or really, and other server manufacturer. The funny thing about machine reliability is that it can be measured. No need to guess really.

It's ridiculous that people like the parent's poster gets modded up for throwing up some unique personal experience that then is used to support some stupid stereotype that may or may not be true.

Re:For The Think Tank

[grahamlee]

Did you know that running Java apps with the -Xoptimize option can cause kernel panics sometimes?

No. Did you know that -Xoptimise hasn't been a part of Java since 1.2? Did you know that there have been two major versions of Java since then? Did you know that the codebase changes between major versions?

It's likely that bug was fixed when -Xoptimize was dropped. It's especially likely because Java was written by Sun!

Support? I agree, it's good! But again, you're paying big bucks for support in most cases.

Nothing new there. Fedora Linux: Free. Red Hat Enterprise: $2000.
Apple XServe without support: GBP2,204.94. Apple XServe with full AppleCare coverage (redundant HW, 3 years service support, 3 years software maintenance): GBP3,504.94.

Re:For The Think Tank

[haruchai]

1.) "Cutting edge" was in quotes - it was play on words with "Blade" - I see you missed the humor in the comment.

2.) I've been a Unix System admin for several years and have considerable exposure to Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD and a small amount of experience with some other flavors.

3.) I don't have to worry about an "similarly configured PC" keeping up with a Sun Blade because for the SAME MONEY as the Sun box, you can get a hell of a lot of PC, especially if, as I do, you build your own. If you have too many to build, choose your components and configuration and get one of hundreds (thousands?) of stores or businesses to put them together for you.

4.) True, the Blades are 64-bit and your apps may require that but between the most recent Pentium 4 and AMD's latest and greatest, affordable 64-bit has (FINALLY) come to x86.

5.) Who said anything about Win32?

6.) Of course, if your apps require 64-bit Solaris, then this is all moot. But there's a hell of a difference between technical superiority and platform lock-in - which I abhor.

7.) Some diversity is good; too much is pointless, especially if they're re-inventiing the wheel. I love Linux but do we need all those distros?

CPU

[Linthos]

How many more SPARC processors will Sun release? Or systems designed around them? I have read many times that it is in their best interests to cut in R&D on their own and use other bases, to help them focus on designing the overall system...

Re:CPU

[nelsonal]

I think the SPARC IV is due sometime in the next few months (probably just for the big iron for 6 months or so), if I recall correctly it's largely a dual core SPARC III with more incremental improvements. There is at least speculation that SUN will offer an Opteron based workstation in addition to the already announced entry-level server. I think there is development on a SPARC V, Fujitsu seems to be having better luck with their SPAEC implementations currently. There are also rumors that a bigger partnership will develop between the two firm's development.

Re:CPU

[sapbasisnerd]

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.

Re:CPU

[wirehead011001]

I remember reading a an article in eWeek (I believe) that discussed a couple of new SUN machines based on one of AMDs 64bit chips. I am not sure whether it was the opteron or the FX series of chips. It was something I just glanced over considering I am not buying /working with allot of SUN equipment, but I did find it interesting nonetheless that sun will begin to outsource chips. On a side note it is interesting to hear that SUN is going to be building new dual core SPARCs, it seems that they are following in the foot steps of IBM and the Power4. Multi core fabrics in CPUs seem to be catching on in the high end computing market.

fubar

[Anonymous Coward]

still brings value to those who do visualization and imaging

And that have more money than sense.

Re:fubar

[afidel]

Or who know what they need. When routing our ASIC's we take more than 8GB per process so SUN workstations with dual CPU's and maxed ram (32GB) are the only things that make sense. Of course if we could have kept the size down below 8GB then Opteron's would have killed the SUN's on price/performance. I just wish someone would come out with a supported Opteron platform with truely large memory support.

Re:fubar

[TheLink]

Opterons have their memory controllers built in, so there are some limitations (as well as advantages). e.g. 3-4 RAM modules per CPU or something like that. So for a 2 CPU system - 512MB per module = 4GB max. 1GB per module = 8GB max. 2GB per module = 16GB max.

4GB dimms are kinda expensive and speeds may be limited e.g.
http://www.crucial.com/store/PartSpecs.asp?i module =CT51272Y265&cat=RAM

80GB Seagate drive?

[WombatDeath]

I'd hope that, for $3-4k, they could do a bit better than an 80GB (2MB cache) Seagate drive. Do "those who do visualization and imaging" really not care about the performance of their storage?

I've never yet seen a machine which skimps on its essential components justify its price tag. No surprise here.

Re:80GB Seagate drive?

[PoiBoy]

This is Sun's entry-level workstation, for people don't do heavy lifting but need to be able to work in a Solaris environment.

The Blade 2000 and Blade 2500 workstations have SCSI drives, better graphics, and much faster USparc III Cu processors with 8 MB cache, etc.

Re:80GB Seagate drive?

[Brandybuck]

That's local storage. Think about where this is going to be used.

Re:80GB Seagate drive?

[jdigital]

The 2500 has IIIi CPU. The Blade 2000 is the only one offering a III, afaik.

Re:80GB Seagate drive?

[ameoba]

The 8MB version of the drive costs, at most, $10 more than the 2MB drive. Considering the performance boost you'd get from such a small expenditure, why cut corners there?

Re:80GB Seagate drive?

[moosesocks]

Because the more expensive model loses some of its edge. Remember, they are trying to make a profit.

Also, the difference in pricing forsuch large quantities as sun buys may be much larger than the price difference seen by consumers. Also, $10 per machine * 10,000 machines = $100,000. Not exactly chump change, especially when you consider Sun's revenues these days.

Re:80GB Seagate drive?

[bn557]

Also, $10 per machine * 10,000 machines = $100,000. Not exactly chump change, especially when you consider Sun's revenues these days.

think of it this way: they're getting, at a minimum, say $2000 when selling these machines in bulk to schools and such. to make back that $100,000 dollars the would only need to sell an extra 50 PCs. to make a moderate amount of extra profit, say, sell another 100. now offering a higher quality machine can easily boost sales by 1% if it's the same price.

Re:80GB Seagate drive?

[christophersaul]

They care a great deal, which is why they'll have fibre channel or high end NAS devices at the end of a Gb network connection to store those 30Gb seismic imaging files, car designs, etc.

Re:80GB Seagate drive?

[lindsayt]

Why the hell was this modded as a troll? Other than his speed calculation, he's exactly right - sun envisions the builtin disk as a place to put the OS and local software; all real work is meant to be store either across the network, or on real disk connected locally.

Of course the maximum data transfer rate you can get from a single T3 tray is 100MB/s, and from a single 6120 (T4) is 200MB/s, but he's not even really "trolling" here since the maximum bandwidth of the PCI bus is in fact 500MB/s...

Am I missing something here? I work with sun equipment daily and this seems legit...

Re:80GB Seagate drive?

[Wiz]

The US3+ CU is NO FASTER than the US3i at the same clock. Sure it has 8MB cache vs 1MB cache, but the US3i is on-chip and much quicker and has lower memory latency.

US3+ CU's only use remains large SMP systems.

Re:80GB Seagate drive?

[morcheeba]

The machine already has 512 or 1024 MB of memory, of which Solaris already uses a decent amount of that as cache. Solaris can manage that cache better than the hard drive because it has more information available to it (like knowing what blocks represent deleted files that no longer have to be cached). So, the only advantage of a larger disk-based cache is that it needs to be filled fewer times (less interrupts)... solaris is good at managing interrupt latencies (so the disk's cache won't empty under heavy loads), and the difference between 10 and 2.5 interrupts per second (2MB and 8MB at 20MB/sec) is negligable.

Besides saving the $10, Sun also gets to choose from a broader range of suppliers, yielding bigger savings that could be more usefully put into expanding the main RAM. (or improving the look of that ugly case!)

Re:80GB Seagate drive?

[nester]

the only advantage of a larger disk-based cache is that it needs to be filled fewer times (less interrupts)

the drive's controller filling cache definetly does not cause interrupts to the host. a drive with cache segments >= one track is ideal.

solaris is good at managing interrupt latencies (so the disk's cache won't empty under heavy loads)

huh? this makes no sense. intr latency has nothing to do with drive cache.

Re:80GB Seagate drive?

[morcheeba]

the only advantage of a larger disk-based cache is that it needs to be filled fewer times (less interrupts)

What I meant was that when the cache became empty, the os should re-fill it relatively pronto, or else the drive is sitting idle not transfering data. (I'm talking about writes here)

You do bring up a good point... the drive may have more info than the OS if it has information about the physical location of the data on the drive (which may not be contiguous because of bad sectors being remapped). It would be cool if the drive could communicate this stuff back to the OS to factor in.

Solaris is good at managing interrupt latencies (so the disk's cache won't empty under heavy loads)
If the drive indicates that it is about out of cache data, and the OS can't get it new data quickly (the latency is too long), the drive will become idle and thoroughput will go down. (again talking about writes)

Re:80GB Seagate drive?

[grahamsz]

Well i'm not too up on the high end stuff, but i cant see any obvious reason why you couldn't have multiple controllers.

Also you'll need to share your PCI bandwidth with other cards, like maybe a gigabit ethernet. I'm not sure if any p4 boards can match the speed of sun's pci system.

Re:Brings value?

[rice_web]

How can Apple sell hardware? I mean, how could they possibly sell a single Mac? /me types away on my PowerMac G5

Performace

[vpscolo]

Comparing Sun with x86 is a bit apples and oranges. Maybe on sheer performance it will be beaten by x86 however for crunching big data sets the UltraSparc is just more effecient. Also some software only runs on Solaris so for that this box is good. However I did wonder why it came with Solaris 8 rather than something newer Rus

Re:Performace

[jmt9581]

How can paying more for a system that doesn't perform as well as comparable hardware be "more efficient?" The primary drive is an IDE drive with only a 2MB cache. You're right, Solaris 8 is definitely a weird choice considering that 9 has been out for so long.

Also, are there really that many pieces of good software that only run on Solaris these days?

Re:Performace

[be-fan]

Maybe on sheer performance it will be beaten by x86 however for crunching big data sets the UltraSparc is just more effecient.
----------
If by "efficient" you mean "more instructions per clock" than yes, UltraSPARC is more efficient. But workstation people really don't care about efficiency. They care about total instructions executed per second. And x86 machines have the upper hand here.

There are lots of advantages to Sun hardware generally, but this machine doesn't seem to have those:

- Sun machines usually have high-quality SCSI disk drives. This machine has a standard PC IDE drive.
- Sun machines usually have support for many CPUs. This machine supports one.
- Sun machines usually have insane memory bandwidth. This machine has less bandwidth than a P4.
- Sun machines usually have extensive I/O capabilities. This machine has your standard 64/66 PCI slots.

Re:Performace

[TheSunborn]

It only got 1MB Cache and a rather slow harddisk. And it can't take more then 4GB ram so I really can't imagine what kind of task it would be good at.

It does have a nice 3D card but 3d is one of the things that really DO require number chrunching, so putting the Wildcat in PC with the fastest Pentium IV/Athlon would give a faster and cheeper system.

The only use for this system as far as I can see is for people who need to run Solaris and for some reason can't run it on intel.

Re:Performace

[Mod Me God]

I wonder that also, but a choice quote:

I really wanted to test the graphics capabilities of this machine, but the program just wouldn't compile properly. I spent days searching Google, reading forums, and sifting through mailing lists looking for answers. I made some progress, but after delaying this story for more than a week I decided it was time to publish it one way or the other.

Why not just ask Sun, they designed it! The reviewer may not have the gold-with-bells-and-whistles support contract (not the Solaris expertise most admins/users would have, seemingly), but for a sneak peak review of a system I'm sure they would have been happy to help out.

Likewise ...measuring performance was a very difficult task because of the amount of reading, research, and configuration that had to go into Solaris 8 to get it to compile benchmark programs.. Now I'm sure Sun had not had a wet dream one day and come up with a whole new processor without coming up with a way to test it. Why not ask them, I'm sure they would oblige, and if not flame them in the review? Better that than search on newsgrops for a computer only you have.

This 'review' was an example of utterly incompetant analysis and journalism.

Re:Performace

[Mod Me God]

It only got 1MB Cache and a rather slow harddisk. And it can't take more then 4GB ram so I really can't imagine what kind of task it would be good at

That is because you're thinking in x86 terms. The 8MB cache the III has and the 1MB cache it has makes little difference. The CPU is a little brother of the III, not a peer of the P4. They are designed for completely different jobs.

A crap analogy would be: a fork is shit for eating soup (unless it has many vegetables, but then maybe a chopstick) but a spoon is shit for pronging meat.

Re:Performace

[TheSunborn]

But what kind of task would it be good at?

Re:Performace

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Performace

[Brandybuck]

It only got 1MB Cache and a rather slow harddisk. And it can't take more then 4GB ram so I really can't imagine what kind of task it would be good at.

It's a workstation! It doesn't need more than 4GB of RAM! It's not supposed to be a supercomputer or a server or a kiddie's game box. It's a freaking workstation!

Re:Performace

[inode_buddha]

Well I'm not familiar with Sun products at all (links appreciated) but did you see the asking price for HP Visualize workstations? This could compete with that it seems. I'd bet its a very narrowly focused product.

Re:Performace

[ValourX]

Okay, I know this is feeding the trolls and such, but I knew this issue would come up.

I did ask Sun, not only for benchmarks that they used for testing, but at very least for results that they'd gotten from their SPEC benchmarks that everybody runs. I waited, re-requested and did not receive them.

The reason why SPEC ViewPerf wouldn't install was because of a problem with GCC that I couldn't figure out and couldn't get from Google. Since it wasn't an issue with Solaris 8 (well, sort of) and wasn't an issue with the hardware, I didn't publish anything that I couldn't verify personally. If you feel that's poor journalism then, quite frankly, you don't belong on the Internet.

The Blade 1500 has been for sale since November. It's completely unreasonable to assume that only I had access to it...

-Jem

Re:Performace

[TheSunborn]

I know. I am just trying to find out why anyone would want to use a Sunblade insted of an cheeper and faster x86 workstation. The only reason I could find were solaris.

Re:Performace

[Mod Me God]

Well, I am not a troll so you are not feeding me, but warm regards all the same.

But why not disclose that in the article. The #1 rule in good journalism _must_ be a fair and balanced opinion, it is only fair you let Sun know you were going to publish an atricle and post it to a major *NIX webiste. Sun might not be the fairest company, but that is no reason to drag yourself to that level. And if they refuse provide the evidence in the article.

Apologies though, I was now aware the system had been available for 2 months already. Guess I was misled by the title "Sun's new UltraSPARC workstation: the Blade 1500". But it was posted my _michael_ so I suppose a hidden agenda is compulsory.

Re:Performace

[ValourX]

Warm regards indeed; pleased to meet you and sorry about the troll comment.

I didn't just fall off of the silicon truck -- I've written reviews of Sun products before and I'm working on one more right now. I gave Sun several days to read the article before it was posted. This gives them a chance to correct any major mistakes that I might have made, and it also gives them a chance to respond if they feel I've been unfair. Then I wrote one last warning saying I was going to publish it if I hadn't heard back within another day.

I have a pretty good relationship with Sun, and I don't feel that the article was at all negative or unfair... and if they did, they had every opportunity to work with me to change anything biased or factually incorrect. And if they hated the review, why did they post it in their Press section? I don't think I've been unfair with them at all; it seems that they don't feel that way either.

In regards to the benchmarking tests, it was my guess that they only wanted to show that it was faster than the Blade 150 and didn't care about much else, or perhaps they didn't have anything to send me. Their primary target with the Blade 1500 is customers who already have a Blade 150. Benchmarking is just gravy anyway; I value a good review with a few pictures over a poor review with lots of graphs any day. That's what makes my site unique among review sites. Anyway, all that potential customers (readers, in other words) really want to know is that the Blade 1500 is twice as fast CPU-wise as the Blade 150 and there is no need to change software when upgrading. In the workstation market that's a tremendous value, even if it seems trivial to us desktop users.

Re:Performace

[ameoba]

The Blade 1500 has been for sale since November. It's completely unreasonable to assume that only I had access to it...

Well, from the looks of the machine, I'd be suprised if anyone would actually go out and buy one...

Re:Performace

[jaavaaguru]

Sun's DBX debugger is an excellent tool (GDB doesn't give you the fork-following options that DBX supports). AFAIK, it only runs on Solaris. Very useful for development of software that requires to fork.

Re:Performace

[thewiz]

There are lots of advantages to Sun hardware generally, but this machine doesn't seem to have those:

- Sun machines usually have high-quality SCSI disk drives. This machine has a standard PC IDE drive.
- Sun machines usually have support for many CPUs. This machine supports one.
- Sun machines usually have insane memory bandwidth. This machine has less bandwidth than a P4.
- Sun machines usually have extensive I/O capabilities. This machine has your standard 64/66 PCI slots.

You forgot to mention that Sun USED to manufacture their own machines. Now they have Acer Computers do it for them (literally!).

Re:Performace

[colins]

+5 Insightful? Please.

"crunching big data sets" means what? Unless your application needs to stuff >4GB of data into RAM at once, a decent Xeon will outperform the UltraSparc III/IIIi by an order of magnitude.

We've switched from UltraSparcs to x86 servers for our reservoir simulations (Oil&Gas), and we're looking to switch to x86 workstations as soon as our vendors all line up behind the same RedHat release.

We'll keep a couple of Sun boxes around for the rare cases where we really need 64bit (until Opteron is supported by our vendors), but even with the huge datasets with deal with (offshore seismic projects) these instances are rare.

colins

Re:Performace

[Billly Gates]

A Dell precision workstation is cheaper.

HP overcharges.

At least the HP has scsi and raid with fast hard drives unlike the sun.

Re:Performace

[colins]

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

Re:Performace

[colins]

You should try to get a Forte license and compile with that.

But I do think everyone needs to recognize that Sun hasn't published Viewperf stats for any of their workstations/graphics cards since the Blade 1000 + Expert3D debuted around October 2000 and finally gave them a benchmark that could beat SGI (the Octane at the time). Read into that what you will. I take from it that they'd rather just leave it ambiguous, instead of providing some numbers for you to compare to a 3Ghz x86 box with an nVidia Quadro4 or Quadro FX.

Even if the hardware was close, Sun can't compete driver wise with nVidia.

-cjs

Re:Performace

[inode_buddha]

Yes, a Dell is cheaper, and HP probably overcharges. But I think that's an apples-to-oranges comparison since the HP I looked at had PA-RISC cpu's, *huge* RAM, and HP-UX installed. I'd be surprised if Dell had something similar (not that I looked). IOW, I was looking at mid-range to high-end workstations. FWIW they went from $6k to $12k USD, intended for CAD, modelling, and scientific work.

Re:Performace

[oingoboingo]

Maybe on sheer performance it will be beaten by x86 however for crunching big data sets the UltraSparc is just more effecient

Could you provide hard evidence of UltraSPARC systems beating comparably priced Athlon64 or Opteron systems for large data set problems? There are a lot of people in this discussion regurgitating that old chestnut. While it might have been true 5 years ago comparing an UltraSPARC workstation to a 32-bit Pentium III system with a constipated little 133MHz bus, times have most definitely changed. Show me solid benchmarks of a Blade 1500 beating out an Athlon64/Opteron system of the same price, and I'll happily run out and tell everyone that they should be buying an UltraSPARC for their next workstation.

Also some software only runs on Solaris so for that this box is good
Ahh NOW we're getting somewhere. Agreed. People who can only run their apps on SPARC/Solaris are locked into the platform, and have no choice. Kind of like all the graphic designers and desktop publishers who were locked into the Mac until serious ports started showing up on the PC. So what's going to happen when the inevitable happens and your specialty app appears for x86/Linux?

Sure, the hardware cost might only be 1% of the software cost for some specialised applications that (for now) only run on SPARC. But why would anyone choose to run their app on a slower, single-vendor proprietary plaform when a faster, open one is available?

They aren't going to, and we can all look forward to seeing the end of Sun's anachronistic SPARC workstation line in the near future.

Re:Performace

[oingoboingo]

It's a workstation! It doesn't need more than 4GB of RAM! It's not supposed to be a supercomputer or a server or a kiddie's game box. It's a freaking workstation!

Uhhhh...technical workstations have traditionally been used for stuff like large scale CAD and industrial design work, complex graphic visualizations and mathematical modelling. The traditional realm of the 'workstation' (before the term was highjacked by every x86 vendor with a minitower case and a 3 button mouse) was CPU, memory and graphics intensive work that would normally make a 'kiddie's game box' break down and cry. Having the ability to have a lot of RAM in a workstation is a key feature.

The technical workstation market was how Sun got started. The Blade 1500 is a very poor excuse for a technical workstation, yet it is priced like one. It's lack of RAM capacity is yet another illustration of this point.

Re:Performace

[nelsonal]

Looking cool on the PHB's desk or filling a big trading room. Who do you think has enough to buy these overpriced PCs. As much as I don't want to reccomend them, it seems like an HP Itanium system or a Dell Xeon would be better for getting actual work done. The Itanium systems are surprisingly reasonable, in the workstation world). If IBM has a Power4 workstation out that would rock, too. Also shortly after the g5 PowerMacs were announced I heard a rumor that IBM would be building a cheaper workstation based on the PPC970 chip, are they still planning this?

Re:Performace

[nelsonal]

I don't know if huge RAM means over 4 Gigs or if you software runs on Windows or Linux, but Dell has a pretty nice PC workstation (SCSI, Fire or Wildcat graphics, dual Xeons and the like) in the Prcision 650 or 450s, the 250 seems to be Dimension/Optiplex internals. I've never used Dell's PC workstations, but HPs older (PII and PIII) machines were well (perhaps even over-) built little buggers. I think Verizon bought these to replace their engineers' proprietary workstations last spring.
If you haven't bought yet, you might look at HPs Itainum 2 workstations (I think they have generally replaced the Kayak and PC Visualize systems there), I think they were a bit cheaper than the PA-RISC stuff. The zx2000 started at around $2000.

Re:Performace

[ajagci]

Maybe on sheer performance it will be beaten by x86 however for crunching big data sets the UltraSparc is just more effecient.

Oh, and how exactly is it going to be "just more efficient"? Crunching big data sets may be limited by CPU or I/O. In terms of CPU, this thing is slow no matter which way you look at it. And in terms of I/O, it uses the same IDE drives as everybody else, and its Ethernet isn't going to be any faster either.

15 years ago, Sun workstations were a great deal: for under $2000, you could get something that no PC, no Mac, no other machine could compete with. Today, they are overpriced underperformers. Sun is milking their remaining customers who are unlucky enough to have committed to a Solaris environment.

Also some software only runs on Solaris so for that this box is good.

Yup, and that's why people buy these things. Of course, you can get equivalent or better software for other platforms, so anybody starting out now would be a fool to buy into Solaris, but those unlucky few who are stuck on Solaris software will just have to make do with this.

Re:Performace

[inode_buddha]

OK, you got me there. Personally I consider huge RAM to be anything over 2 gigs (I'm using 1 gig ATM) but the industry seems to use 4 gigs as a cut-off point.

I'm not necessarily considering Windows or Linux at that price point, though I using linux day-to-day. Of course I'd probably install it anyway just for familiarity. Like I said in a previous post, it maybe unfair for me to do that comparison because I'm comparing purpose-built RISC CPU's with commercial UNIXes installed: PA-RISC with HP-UX vs. SPARC with Solaris. Intel wasn't even in that picture (let alone AMD) when I first considered it. So, it was a bad comparison that I made, and I need to look again.

Feature-wise, the SCSI and Wildcat graphics are a big plus; the Xeons might be the close competitor from Intel.

FWIW, the Kayak and the Visualize were the ones that got my attention but that was 18 months ago. I've also looked at SGI and IBM.

Other considerations: I've seen that Linus isn't too terribly crazy about Itanium. PA-RISC support seems "iffy" according to recent kernel builds. Dell has been having support issues offshore. For now, I'll hold onto my money and see what happens in the next few months. FWIW, I *hope* HP continues to "over-engineer" things with Torx screws, Compaq style; those were some of the easiest machines I've ever had to upgrade.

Re:Performace

[inode_buddha]

" Sun's DBX debugger is an excellent tool (GDB doesn't give you the fork-following options that DBX supports). AFAIK, it only runs on Solaris. Very useful for development of software that requires to fork."

IIRC DBX is the generic SysV debugger, so anything derived from that probably has it. AFAIK that would include AIX, HP-UX, *and* Solaris. And a few zillion others. At least that's what I recall from the O'Reilley book.

Re:Performace

[calidoscope]

And it can't take more then 4GB ram

The memory limit on the SB1500 is 16 GB of RAM achieved by stuffing the 4 DIMM slots with 4 GB modules. Crucial sells modules that look like they will work for a measly $6999 each. Crucial does sell 2 GB modules that will work in the V240 and should work in the SB1500 (PC2100 - 168 pin DIMM's, ECC, registered and CL=2.5) - these modules were listing for $899 ea this last week.

The 4 GB RAM limit is for memory that Sun currently supports (and sells) - i.e., if the box is under warranty and the ram flakes out, Sun is obligated to fix it. If you use 3rd party RAM (e.g. Crucial), then it is up to you to deal with problems with RAM.

The low end Sun boxes do have some feature not available on x86 PC's (I'm old enough and curmudgeonly enough to remember when PC meant Personal Computer and didn't imply an x86 box). Even the low end Sun's have open boot firmware, which is nicer than most PC bios's. Solaris/Sparc has had the no execute from stack feature for several years now. You do have an option of a Unix style keyboard (i.e. key next to the 'A' key).

This is the second time I've read the Jem report and the second time wondering if Jem has any clue.

Re:Performace

[bruthasj]

> Why not just ask Sun, they designed it!

We asked Sun why their NFS server kept crashing causing some serious downtime in one of our manufacturing facilities. We were signed up with Silver Stirling (or whatever) support and had local Sun engineers look into the problem. They couldn't figure it out, and therefore needed to submit the logs, core, and other relevant information to Sun. Timeframe for answer on the problem: one year.

Yep! That's right folks, one whole year. We're sitting here paying tens of thousands in support and that's the response we got.

Well, the decision was easy from thenceforth. Scrap Sun and Solaris and we went with IBM and Linux. It's been great ever since.

YMMV, but our experience has been wholly negative.

On a positive note, Sun Solaris is what brought me into the world of Unix, so I do have to give it credit. It rocks over HP-UX, which royally sux. I'll put that in another comment when an HP-UX article comes up later...

Re:Performace

[Mondragon]

First of all, I don't know what you're doing building the SPEC tests with GCC on Sparc, since that's hardly a test of optimal performance. Building with the SunPro compiler is not only the right thing to do (shouldn't be hard to believe that Sun's compiler optimizes better for their own hardware), but it also happens to compile just fine on the 1500.

Also, I don't have a lot of respect for someone who claims that WD hard drives are of better quality than Seagate drives. As someone who has killed every WD drive I've ever seen in a real workstation environment, I'll take a Seagate any day, even if it is IDE.

Re:Performace

[tskirvin]

Even if the hardware was close, Sun can't compete driver wise with nVidia.
You're kidding, right? Sun's video drivers work. nVidia's don't. Case closed, as far as I'm concerned.
Before I get modded down as a troll: I run both SB2000s and a whole pile of Linux boxes with GeForce cards. The GeForce drivers aren't *awful*, but they definitely fall over when you push their OpenGL. New versions of the drivers have consistently caused just as many problems as they've fixed. My users are used to having X crash once every couple of days on the Linux boxes, and occasionally gripe that they miss the stability their old Sun Ultra 10s gave them.
The annoying part is that nVidia has the best Linux drivers on the market. We can barely get ATI's to work in our environment at all, and even then just on test systems; and don't get me started on 3DLabs...

Re:Performace

[fdawg]

"If by "efficient" you mean "more instructions per clock" than yes, UltraSPARC is more efficient."

SUN use RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) Processors.

x86 (which is really just the 386 instruction set with extensions...which is really just the 8086 instruction set with some changes) is a CISC ( Complex Instruction Set Computer).

Obviously a SUN would require more instructions per cycle (not necessarily clock) to do the same task. Efficeincy can not be compared by architecture, but by the amount of time it takes to complete said tasks. In that case, "x86" (I really hate that term, its misleading) is the winner...until you SMP them. SUN then wins hands down.

Also insane memory bandwidth is required when 6 fetch operations are required on a RISC environment when the same operation can be done in 2 on a CISC.

It should be noted that the "high quality SCSI drives" are still rebranded Seagates.

Re:Performace

[christophersaul]

The tasks it's good at are running the Solaris based high end 3D applications for the vertical industries who need those kind of apps. It's also good for Solaris developers, good as an admin machine, test machine in a Sun server environment, etc, etc.

If you want to run games, get a PC, if you want to a cluster of machines to 'make' a 32 bit supercomputer, get a Xeon based V60 from Sun, if you need a large 64 bit SMP box, buy one of them from Sun. Right tool for the right job.

Re:Performace

[christophersaul]

Why is Sun in trouble? They are capable of making lots of products - you don't have to keep making the same thing when markets change. Why do you think they've moved towards making X86 based servers and has teamed up with AMD.

Just talking about processors also leaves out the fact that you need an OS to run apps on and Solaris is still superior in many situations.

Re:Performace

[FyRE666]

I think this is more a reflection of poor administration than driver issues. I personally have set up a great many machines with both ATi and Nvidia cards. Never had a problem with ATi, except when trying some beta drivers. Nvidia, well the latest driver release seems a little odd, however if you stick with the 4496 driver at the moment it's plenty stable.

As someone who had to suffer with an Ultra10 and CDE for a year - I'd GLADLY experience a problem once a week with a nice fast machine with powerful graphics than the horror of 256 colour VGA style graphics where you can actually feel the machine struggle to keep up with a window drag across the desktop!

Re:Performace

[0x0d0a]

It should be noted that the "high quality SCSI drives" are still rebranded Seagates.

"Seagates" and "high quality SCSI drives" are hardly mutually exclusive -- if anything, they're closer to synonymous. Seagate is the dominant provider of hard drives for the enterprise market (i.e. pricy, high reliability drives). I think you'll also find, looking back at whatever you considered "high quality" drives, that there's a pretty good chance that it's a Seagate drive.

Re:Performace

[hackstraw]

Benchmarking with gcc on an UltraSparc might tell you the results of generating suboptimal 32bit code for processing graphics and crunching double precision (64bit) numbers. I would imagine that the target audience for these machines would already have a license for the Sun compiler.

Re:Performace

[colins]

Why are you running desktop graphics cards (GeForce) when it sounds like you have a workstation workload?

We run Quadro4 cards on HP workstations. RedHat 7.3 as shipped by HP (scsi, network, gfx drivers pre-installed). We tweak it a bit, but not much (run automount 4.1 so heirarchical mounts work, use xfce4 instead of Gnome or KDE).

We have not seen a single crash, of either Linux or XFree. And we push them very hard - large reservoir models with hundreds of thousands of polygons.

Maybe your problem is the hardware - our configs are similar to what most of the 3D studios are using to run Maya and the like.

Sun's drivers aren't infallible. We've seen rendering errors and crashes on our Blade 1000 and 2000s running Expert3D cards. And Sun has on more than one occasion fixed a bug only to reintroduce it in a later patch level.

If you doubt Sun's OpenGL releases have been bug ridden (it's a challenge for all vendors, not just Sun) just check the patch description for any of the OpenGL releases on sunsolve (if you have a contract login, check patch 112628-24 for example).

I haven't tried any ATI cards on Linux. Their drivers are reportedly getting better, but for a production environment right now, the Quadros are the only cards I'd trust.

-cjs

Re:Performace

[tskirvin]

I suspect we push our systems harder, but I'm not positive so I won't push the case... At any rate, our Suns are essentially rock solid.
Why not Quadros instead of GeForces? Price, the GeForces have always seemed quicker to market with new features to me, and the knowledge that it's the drivers that seem to have caused us most of our problems so far, not the cards themselves. We don't have the budget to buy the quantities of SB2000s w/XVR1000s that we'd like; we just have to de-rack old cluster machines most of the time. Still, even the Linux boxes offer us weeks of uptime if we don't push the graphics. They're stable systems. I wouldn't settle for anything less.
And as for OpenGL drivers with Sun, I will admit that part of my biases come from the fact that we've got Sun engineers more than happy to help us fix any problems we come across rapidly. At the same time, our developers have been literally begging nVidia and other companies to fix OpenGL and driver bugs for years, only to be rebuffed with "we don't have the manpower" constantly. I've seen what they go through...
And oh yes, stereo. Can't forget stereo. Linux doesn't do it, Suns do...and we need it, at least some of the time. Yes, it's a matter of the cards, but still...

Re:Performace

[tskirvin]

Never buy a Sun with anything less than the best video card available for that platform, if you're going to use it at the console. Me, I was always more than content with my Ultra 10 with Elite3Dm6 graphics. Never caused me any problems, never felt slow...

Re:Performace

[Wiz]

If by "efficient" you mean "more instructions per clock" than yes, UltraSPARC is more efficient.

Then you need to get with the times if you even think this is correct. I ran a load of EDA apps on SPARC, Xeons and Opterons.

Guess what? The Opteron is 33% quicker CLOCK FOR CLOCK! As they clock a lot higher, you can guess they were a lot quicker.

On a side, I've found Sun's Ultra 5s to be very prone to failures.

Re:Performace

[Billly Gates]

Sun lost 2 billion dollars last year! And another 3 billion from the previous. ... products or not they need to get together or go belly up soon.

Their products are nice but their is no demand for expensive equipment anymore due to the economy.

This is why they are in trouble.

Re:Performace

[colins]

Tim,

If you've got Sun engineers fixing your Sun issues, why aren't you using HP/IBM/etc or similar to fix your Linux issues? They'd gladly sell you a 3D workstation with a good support contract.

The GeForces might be quicker to market with new features, but how's that in comparison to the Sun boxes which use rebadged 3DLabs hardware (a year or more after the same technology is shipping for the PC from 3DLabs)?

You're concerned about price (and so are we). For the price of a single SB2000+XVR1000 you can get a handful of XW4100s+Quadro4 machines running Linux. There is no stability issue with these machines doing OpenGL, I can vouch for that myself as I'm sure the folks at Dreamworks, ILM, etc can as well.

Stereo support (non-xinerama mode) has been in the Linux nVidia driver since at least November 2002. They added stereo support in Xinerama mode (TwinView) in July of last year. See the release notes for v44.96:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_ 1. 0-4496.html

Perhaps you should give the Quadros another look - you could be saving a bunch of money and getting 3 or 4 times the 3D performance you're currently seeing.

-cjs

Re:Performace

[be-fan]

-1: Outdated knowledge

Modern x86 and Sun chips both use RISC cores. As far as x86 chips are concerned, the x86 instruction set is just a nice, compact bytecode. As x86 instructions come in, they are broken down to the CPU's internal RISC operations, called u-Ops by Intel, and ROPs by AMD. Instructions in x86 that are already very simple (register-to-register MOV) correspond to a single u-Op or ROP. Slightly more complex instructions correspond to two or three different u-Ops or ROPs. Even more complex instructions are handled in microcode.

When one talks about the IPC of x86 chips, one talks about how many u-Ops or ROPs get executed, not how many x86 instructions get executed. It just so happens that many of the instructions that are rather popular for benchmarks (integer and floating point arithmatic) happen to correspond directly to u-Ops or ROPs, so making the distinction isn't worthwhile.

Since IPC is defined in those terms, a Pentium 4 is measured to have terrible IPC. Its long-pipeline really hurts the number of instructions that get executed per cycle. Athlon chips are better (and the new Athlon 64 is very good), but on a whole, traditional "RISC" chips like the Alpha are measured to have better IPC.

As for memory bandwidth, you'll find that since both processors operate in terms of the underlying RISC-y memory model, both will have the same bandwidth needs. Modern x86 processors do *not* do operations in memory like their predecessors. An integer add where one operand is in memory will be broken down into a load from memory and a register-register add. The only difference at work is that RISC code (being fixed-length) is less compact that x86 code (being variable length) and that 64-bit machines have 64-bit pointers while 32-bit machines have 32-bit pointers. Both of these make it so that traditional "RISC" chips need slightly more memory bandwidth, but the difference is not huge.

Seagate's SCSI drivers are "high quality SCSI drives." Their IDE hardware might not be great, but their SCSI lineup is very good.

Re:Performace

[be-fan]

The comparison wasn't with the Opteron, but the P4 1.8GHz mentioned in the article.

Re:Performace

[Brandybuck]

The traditional realm of the 'workstation' (before the term was highjacked by every x86 vendor with a minitower case and a 3 button mouse) was CPU, memory and graphics intensive work that would normally make a 'kiddie's game box' break down and cry.

And the traditional workstation never needed 4 gigabytes of memory. So why the poo-pooing of that limit?

Re:Performace

[christophersaul]

You're right - Sun have not been profitable. In terms of 'expensive equipment' you're out of date.

The V440 is half the price of the equivalent Dell and Sun can't make the V210 and V240 fast enough to meet customer demand. The V60 and V65 x86 boxes have been very successful, too. At the 8 CPU and up range, Sun compete extremely well with the HPUX and AIX kit. Couple that to the new Opteron systems and I think we'll start to see some people on Slashdot waking up to Sun again.

Simply saying 'expensive equipment' is a little childish. There are capital costs and there are running costs, trade offs between features and so on. It's not simply about buying a PC from your local supermarket because it's 'cheap'.

Re:Performace

[tskirvin]

Not using HP? Well, none of us can stand HP-UX, and their guys screwed up on our campus a while ago and essentially stopped supporting us. Fine, we said, and cheerfully went to Sun. Same goes for SGI. IBM we still talk to, but their prices are even worse...

I will take a look at the Quadros some time; it couldn't hurt, after all. But I'm still dubious.

Re:Performace

[Wiz]

The P4 is so in-efficient clock-for-clock that just about everything is better than it!

Re:Performace

[TheSunborn]

The 4GB was from the datasheet. Why don't sun just buy some 1/2/4GB ram modules and rebrand them as their own?

Martin Tilsted

Re:Performace

[oingoboingo]

And the traditional workstation never needed 4 gigabytes of memory. So why the poo-pooing of that limit?

It depends on what you're doing. For complex modelling tasks the problem often needs to be scaled down to the amount of RAM you have available, not the other way around. You could always stuff 8GB of RAM into an SGI Octane, which is about as 'traditional' a workstation type of computer as they come. Someone obviously needed that kind of capacity for SGI to build it in.

Wow

[keesh]

That's ugly. I'd like one, but does it ship with a can of spray paint to get rid of the huge red blob? Looks like an angel or something...

Re:Brings value?

[vpscolo]

Sometimes you have to do the job on Sun Hardware

Rus

Re:Brings value?

[repetty]

Are you familiar with the applications that are certified to run on Sun workstations? Not all have been ported to Linux.

--Richard

Article w/o Perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:
The SunPCI III is the most innovative piece of computer hardware I have ever seen. Put simply, it's a small AMD-based computer built into a single PCI card

What's so innovative about that? Apple had intel cpu's on pci card for the original powermacs and Sun has had similar cards for awhile.

Re:Article w/o Perspective

[chill]

Commodore did an "Bridge Card" for the Amiga 2000 way back in 1986-1987. Both 8088 and 80286 and it "bridged" the Amiga's Zorro slots and the included ISA slots, allowing the use of both Amiga and PC hardware.

This concept has been around for a while, this is just a refinement.

Re:Article w/o Perspective

[BrookHarty]

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.

Re:If I wanted to pay for overpriced hardware

[OSX ROOT]

I would buy a dual G5 :)

What a scam!

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Despite that, the Blade series still brings value to those who do visualization and imaging.

This is by far the most overrated device since the Hindenburg won the 1937 Lakehurst Best Lighter-than-air Aircraft competition.

-- Ray Charles

64 bit dominance

[damacer]

From the article:

"The proprietary 64-bit workstation market is dominated by Sun Microsystems, which sells more 64-bit machines than any other company -- their market share is over 60%."

I wonder how long this market domninance is going to last now that commodity hardware is going 64. (e.g. a 64-bit laptop for $1,549)

Re:64 bit dominance

[potifar]

Hmm, 500,000 out of 700,000 would be about 71% of the market...

Eww. Looks worse than an iMac

[Anonymous Coward]

Uglist. Box. Evar. That red dot -- if you punch it hard enough, does it explode (assuming you make it through the AT field...)?

Re:Eww. Looks worse than an iMac

[neonstz]

Well, at least they don't light up the entire room as the Blade 1000/2000's do.

Anyway, we've recently bought a bunch of these 1500's at work, so I may be able to do some benchmarking on them. I've got an old 1000 myself and it works just fine. (It's amazing how you don't need to upgrade every 6 months when you don't run games. I even got a 2,5 year old PC (a dual p4 xeon), and it works just fine for what I do (software development)).

Re:Brings value?

[thesupraman]

Not that I'm saying that the machine would be my choice, but..

This machine is 64bit moron! UltraSPARC has been 64bit for quite some time now.. It's software is all 64bit, it has a true 64bit OS.

Not of course that that makes much difference to anything, as there are very few applications that require 64bit addressing as yet. Just about every processor current can move data in at least 64bit chunks.. often 128bit.

Perhaps, next time, take the effort to even open the page you are going to comment on and have a quick glance - it can do wonders!

Stop.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop thinking of computers in terms of speed. Think more of what works for the job. Sun servers can handle far more RAM then Intel machines making them perfect for large databases. They can handle more CPUs then Intel machines, perfect for when clustering isn't an option.

Just because this workstation has less gigahertz then another doesn't mean it's wrong for everything. Does Grandma need it? No, she'll be fine with an Intel or an AMD.

Re:Stop.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Stop.

[Scott]

This would be more accurate if Intel and AMD were stuck in the 32-bit world, but with Itanium and more affordably Opteron, it's not really a valid argument anymore. Unless you're needing more than 8-way (in this case we're looking at a single CPU model), then the non-Sun options are looking mighty fine and can be much more cost effective. I have never been in an academic or business environment where someone wasn't always jonesing for a faster machine.

Re:Stop.

[bhtooefr]

RTFA. It has one CPU socket, and I've heard a maximum of 2.0GB RAM. Also, I'm not having any problems with less gigahertz - keep in mind, I'm pushing the Pentium M, which has a very high IPC as compared to the P4. I'm saying that a rig that performs like a P4 1.8 and costs $5K is a total ripoff. Sure, it has a great video card, but I'd like to take a Blade 1500 Light, and take an Athlon 64 3000+ (which is used for two reasons: "I'm cheap, but my dick is still longer than yours", and it's a cheap way of having a CPU that can handle 64-bit apps when they become available) with a Radeon 9800 Pro, 512MB of whatever the best RAM for that system is, a nice fast HDD (maybe SATA, just to make it unfair), a Plextor DVD +/- RW, etc., etc., and find out how much it costs, and if the US3i is blown out of the water (if a 3000+ can kill a P4EE, and a P4EE, by nature, can kill a P41.8, it's kinda obvious), and do the same on video card (3d rendering tests, maybe?).

Re:Stop.

[val1s]

Sounds like Apple's undercutting Sun Also,

Dual 2.0 Ghz G5 $2,999

64bit, up to 8gigs of ram, 160GB SATA, 1Ghz frontside bus.

Spend the extra 2grand on ram, or hopefully a mini Xserve RAID some day.

Re:Stop.

[haggar]

and I've heard a maximum of 2.0GB RAM

Use those earsticks, dude :o)
From the specifications:

* Processor: One 1-GHz UltraSPARC IIIi processor
* Main memory: Up to 4 GB of registered DDR PC2100 ECC memory
* Network: 10/100/1000-Mbps (Gigabit) Base-T Ethernet port
* Expansion buses: Two separate PCI buses; one 66-MHz, 64-bit PCI slot on dedicated bus; two 33-MHz, 64-bit PCI slots; two 33-MHz, 32-bit PCI slots on the other bus
* Graphics and Imaging: The Sun Blade 1500 workstation supports up to three Sun XVR-100 or up to two Sun XVR-500 graphics accelerators.

Re:Stop.

[j3110]

If you need another SUN system though, and you have a Solaris admin on sight, it can still be cheaper than getting different versions of your software for the hetrogenious environment, that the admin isn't used to, out to the different clients and keeping them in sync.

I agree, SUN hardware has basically been going the way of COBOL. Whenever a company gets the oportunity, they ditch it. A few people still end up getting into the market though, so I don't think they are loosing business, I just think they aren't keeping up the percentage of the market that they had.

I think the future is going to be clusters, and we're all going to have to find a way to divide the problem. Most business software is about moving data more than calculating still yet. Most business computing also deals in a lot of small peices of data that they process, so usually it scales easily so long as your DBMS scales with it. Data partitioning makes life better.

Re:Stop.

[calidoscope]

Sounds like Apple's undercutting Sun Also,

64bit, up to 8gigs of ram, 160GB SATA, 1Ghz frontside bus.

A couple of differences:
Sun uses ECC memory, Apple doesn't
Solaris has supported 64 bit for 5 years

The scuttlebutt on comp.arch is that the Va Tech Mac cluster is pretty much useless for the biggest problems due to the lack of ECC memory. The new Apple G5 servers do have ECC.

OTOH, it would be really nice if the SB1500 supported SATA. By the way, the processor to memory bus is 4.2 GB/sec and the separate I/O bus (Jbus) is capable of about 4 GB/sec.

Re:Stop.

[bhtooefr]

OK, so 4GB. However, let's look at a random Athlon 64 FX/Opteron 1xx board.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?de sc ription=13-131-465R&depa=1

It's a refurbished Asus SK8N, and it can take up to EIGHT gigabytes of ECC up to PC2700. I'll give you that it doesn't have gigabit ethernet, anything other than 33/32 PCI (for PCI - it has an AGP 8x slot), and most likely can't take those big iron graphics cards.

Learning from Mistakes

[jonbrewer]

Hopefully anyone who made the mistake of a Blade 1000 will stay far away. Performance from Sun workstations has been sub-par for years now.

I had a good laugh when one of my Intel workstations and a colleague's Blade 1000 were both hooked up to a compute grid. The benchmarks for BLAST, the bioinformatics tool we were running on the grid, showed my PIII running circles around the bioinformatics geek's favorite machine. What's better is that the Intel machine (an IBM), was bought new for less than $1000, and the Blade had been purchased for over $5000!

Re:Yadda Yadda Yadda

[PoiBoy]

...And they'll be introducing products with the new USparc IV processor, which should help Sun get back into the game.

I stopped reading at this point

[wfberg]

The SunPCI III is the most innovative piece of computer hardware I have ever seen. Put simply, it's a small AMD-based computer built into a single PCI card -- it actually has an Athlon XP 1600+ processor, an onboard AGP 8X graphics chip, onboard 10/100 LAN and two DDR slots which in my test machine were populated with two 512MB modules. This machine within a machine is run through the SunPCI software and is started through a premade startup script that was placed in my default user's home directory. Run the script and the SunPCI card comes to life, booting whatever OS is loaded on it -- in this case, Windows XP Professional. That means that you can have Windows XP Pro running in a window in CDE (the standard UNIX desktop environment) or on a separate monitor that can be connected to the SunPCI card itself. T

Innovative? Didn't apple already do this ages ago?

Re:I stopped reading at this point

[__past__]

No idea about Apple, but Sun surely did. This is not a new offering, not is it specific to this workstation model.

Note that the reviewer didn't say that SunPCI is something new or innovative per se - just that he didn't see anything more innovative before...

Re:I stopped reading at this point

[thalakan]

Yes, and I have one. It runs Windows 9x pretty well. Apple has a page about it.

Re:I stopped reading at this point

[UnknowingFool]

Innovative? Didn't apple already do this ages ago?

I think they called it a daughter board. I remember the demo I saw had Apple Works running on the Mac and Doom playing on the PC.

Re:I stopped reading at this point

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:I stopped reading at this point

[mvdwege]

And Commodore, in the Amiga 2000.

That computer had a bunch of PC expansion slots, of which 2 aligned with the Amiga's own expansion slots. You could buy a PC-on-a-Card that would plug into the two aligned slots, so that some hardware could be shared, but it was basically the same as this SunPCI thing.

Mart

Re:I stopped reading at this point

[bonfire]

Anyone want an SBUS SunPC with a Pentium 120 on it? It's supported under SunOS 4.x - that's how long they've been doing it.

PD

Re:I stopped reading at this point

[0x0d0a]

Orange Micro also sold an x86 expansion board for Nubus-based systems.

Is this a joke?

[cervo]

although it's quite long in the tooth at this point and it isn't even close to the same level of performance that you'd get from a comparably priced AMD64 machine -- or even a 32-bit Intel-based P4 or Xeon computer......It can't touch high-end 32-bit machines in terms of raw performance
And the funniest part of the whole article:
Sun hopes to make it their new bestseller

So you provide a machine with inferior performance that doesn't even support Linux/FreeBSD/The latest version of YOUR OWN Solaris Operating System and you hope it will become a best seller? Are the execs at Sun smoking crack? Sun has done some cool stuff, but maybe it is time to sell some of their stock....

Re:Is this a joke?

[MrPerfekt]

So you provide a machine with inferior performance that doesn't even support Linux/FreeBSD/The latest version of YOUR OWN Solaris Operating System

Newsflash genius, FreeBSD supports Sparc, few Linux's and Sol 9 (I don't know where you got that Sol 9 didn't support an UltraSparc IIIi). They hope it to become their best-seller to replace their low-end and aging Ultra line.

If you need more help, please see my related post.

Re:Is this a joke?

[cervo]

From the article
As it turns out the Blade 1500 is not supported by Solaris 9 yet -- according to Sun it is scheduled to add support for it in the spring 2004 hardware revision.

What about linux and BSD?
Likewise I couldn't get NetBSD, Gentoo, or FreeBSD to work on the Blade 1500 either, for the same reasons. Since there were no other SPARC-based operating systems that I knew of, I was stuck with Solaris 8. Not that it's all that bad to be stuck with, but I had to go to a lot of trouble to get the benchmarking programs to compile and/or run on it.

Oh where would I get that idea from?

Re:Is this a joke?

[MrPerfekt]

I will plainly admit I didn't read the article and that I should be shot. However, usually Sun includes an installer CD for the current version of Solaris. The disc includes an updated kernel and some other things so you can use the latest Solaris. Why that did not happen in this case, I have no idea.

Re:Brings value?

[thammoud]

It's the software baby. Sun can not make the same claim.

Simplicity.

[Moderation abuser]

You already have a network of Sun machines but want something faster and cheaper. No additional complexity. If you start introducing different platforms you begin dividing and conquering the skills and time of your IT staff.

In the same vein, a Windows monoculture would be a great idea if it wasn't for all the architectural and implementational disadvantages.

Re:Simplicity.

[Mr. Darl McBride]

You already have a network of Sun machines but want something faster and cheaper. No additional complexity. If you start introducing different platforms you begin dividing and conquering the skills and time of your IT staff.

So, I figure that means there's a window of opportunity any time replacing all the machines with something else would equal the cost of replacing just the machines which have become unacceptably slow. If you replace your machines on a three year cycle, that means there's an opportunity every 8 months.

That's accelerated even more if you're growing the number of machines, or if you factor in future cost savings. Of course, it's also reduced by training and software procurement costs if you have to replace a bunch of software.

Still. I can't see why they aren't all moving to more cost-effective UNIXes, such as Caldera.

Re:Simplicity.

[Komi]

For my company at least, any more money spend on Sun workstations is a waste of money. I work in the CAD department of a big semiconductor company, and my group has been pushing hard to get things to switch over to Linux. At first we had the chicken/egg scenario, but we threatened to the CAD companies that either they support Linux or we switch to a different brand that will. Now almost everything we use is supported on Linux.

The problem with Sun is that it's three times more expensive and three times slower. We would spend $60k and get a whopping two new Sun servers. Then all the engineers would start throwing jobs at it and it would be dog slow again. Do you know how many Linux machines we could have bought for that much?

Primarily we need computers for raw number-crunching (big simulations) and large memory (big circuits). Linux can handle these just fine, and it's frustrating when other groups blow a load of cash on more Sun equipment.

Komi

Re:Simplicity.

[captredballs]

We just benchmarked our java application on sparc and xeon(solaris/x86) machines and found that the xeon was at least three times faster in all scenarios.

This was for dual cpu machines, I'm sure that the tables would turn if we have 4+.

Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[MrPerfekt]

It's never a suprised that people on slashdot just don't get Sun equipment. Much like Apple, companies (I'd wager extremely few people buy Sun's for personal everyday use) that buy these boxes are buying them for the OS and rarely for the groundbreaking hardware.

They like the support that Sun provides with thier OS and how it's been grown to be rock solid. Yada, yada, yada. Cut to the posts here by people that probably have never seen a Sun box let alone owned/used one and I'm not shocked.

Disclaimer: This is not a troll. ;)

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[Anonymous Coward]

You hit the nail on the head.

These are also the same people who enjoy particpating in system administration discussions when their system administration experience only stems from the 4 boxes they have at home.

Here on Slashdot, 90% of people at any given time are just armchair quarterbacks.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[pagz]

Hrm... I've used only two Sun sparc stations in the past...last month we were trying to power them on...both wouldn't post. On completely refused to obey the power button and the other seemed to have a dead video card.

They are rock solid though...took two of us to move them off the desk space they were occupying to trace the cabling

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[prockcore]

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.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[lewp]

Sun's support is certainly impressive, especially if you're not used to it. And their hardware/software is impressive from a reliability standpoint.

But come on. This is a workstation. As long as it can stay up for a day at a time it's reliable enough, and it's cheaper to just keep a spare or five in the closet than to pay for the kind of support that people think of when they think Sun. Beyond the basic reliability that anything better than Windows 98 can provide, raw performance and price are going to be the deciding factors for this kind of system. Sun just can't play with the big PC manufacturers in both areas at once.

If this were a big Sun Fire box, you'd have a point. As it stands, Slashdotters are probably this machine's best hope: geeks with some disposable income who want a neat toy. After all, you bought a Blade 150, didn't you?

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[ender81b]

I have a friends who work at a local ISP and pretty much their entire shop is sun machines. He uses them because

a.) they are cheap (get em used off ebay from the dot-com bust companies)
b.) easy to secure
c.) last forever. They still use old sparc station 4's for the tech desk staff.

Seems like valid enough reasons to me.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[Endive4Ever]

I bought three Mac G3's on Wednesday. For $10 each. At auction. In Sun hardware, I bought a stack of Ultra 1's awhile back, for $12.50 each. At auction.

This isn't the dot.bomb era anymore, when we can all dump 'big bucks' in neat toys. There are neat toys for cheap, anyway. If you consider Ultra 1's and G3's to be neat toys. (I do)

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[prockcore]

c.) last forever. They still use old sparc station 4's for the tech desk staff.

That's certainly true, I have a pizza box SparcStation2 in my closet.. the thing may be pretty useless these days (33mhz) but it still works.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[Arker]

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.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[IANAAC]

Or you could do what we've done where I work:
Keep support for the hardware only and put Suse 7.3 Sparc on it.
I have no benchmarks, but it sure feels zippier than Solaris 8 or 9 for the kind of stuff we do (NFS&SMB, limited DB stuff).

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[bonfire]

Yup, I will only use Sun gear for my off-site backup NS/MX machines. They are rock solid, regardless of age. The only time they reboot is from power problems beyond UPS/generator capability to deal with.

PD

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[bender647]

Over the years, I've had an IPX, sparc 5, 10, 20, Ultra-10, and now a Blade 2000. I probably missed some, or got the names wrong, but what I'm trying to say is I've got a long history of good performance from Sun with 100% uptime. Now the punchline, since I installed Linux on my Pentium-M laptop and watched it simulate circuits at almost 2X the speed, I've been a Sun basher too. Tasks like compiling Mozilla were even worse than 2X. I know its not overly scientific, but Lintel costs are the clincher. My Sun days are over. The Sun box sticks around for the moment because its got 3G of RAM, but theres new Intel box sitting next to already for more testing.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, I've used lots of Sun hardware. Hell, I personally own [...goes to count...] 9 Sun boxes ranging all the way from a 2/50 to a couple relatively modern ultrasparc machines. Several of them have been my primary home machines at various points in time, others I just picked up for coolness value. Basically, I'm as close to a "Sun fan boy" as they come.

However, I have to agree with the "trolls" - sparc is finished.

I deal with a mix of both SPARC and x86 in my day job doing rather high performance computing - I need every cycle I can get. For the last year or two it's hard to justify even compiling for sparc boxes anymore. We have racks of dual-~3Ghz P4 boxes that cost a couple grand each; how is ultrasparc going to compete with that?

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.

About the only real advantages ultrasparc still has over x86 is the 64-bit memory addressing and SMP scalability. It looks like both of the contenders for the 64-bit x86 replacement (ia64 and x86-64, of course) are going to be very SMP capable (ia64 is in huge SGI boxes today; AMD sounds like they're on the ball too) I think it makes a lot of sense how Sun has been mopving towards x86-64+linux (presumably as a total ultrasparc+solaris replacement, but they won't admit that publically yet)

The only architectures that matter from a non-embedded performance standpoint now are ia32,ia64,x86-64, and ppc64.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[HalfFlat]

Sun hardware and software used to be rock solid, but their low-end range is now cheap and nasty. Of course it isn't cheap in the important, financial sense.

I used to admin a mixed network with many low-end Sun machines (nothing faster than an Ultra 1), and have spent time subbing for an admin in a network with their higher end equipment. This was roughly the time that the Sun Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 were released.

The Ultra 5, even then, was a disgrace.
Unstable, terrible performance compared with x86 hardware at the time, and insanely expensive.

Sun's fabled support generally came down to: 'we don't support what you are trying to do', or 'it might be fixed in the next OS release'. (I believe eventually Sun did get around to fixing the problems Solaris had on this platform.)

Unless you're paying a premium for their best support level, Sun's support just isn't that hot. Or wasn't back in the late 90s anyhow.

These days, for anything with 4 or fewer processors, it's hard to imagine any purchase from Sun being cost effective unless you are somehow tied to the platform. I'm certainly a convert to Linux (or *BSD) on good quality x86 hardware as the best solution in a very wide range of applications. Given Sun's past glory, it's a little sad.

The Sparcstation 2 has to have been one of the best workstations ever made.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[Billly Gates]

Back when I first discovered slashdot people complained that this site was too linux specific and not enough Sun was being mentioned.

The people here were very pro-solaris. Linux Expo 99 and 2000 both had Debian demonstarting how to install Linux on Sun's.

Then Linux grew up and began to take over.

The days of nice equipment and investments on good American labor are long over. Busineses did not look at price tags and they bought Sun in the 90's because it worked.

Today its about cost and bean counters.

Penny by penny Sun is a joke.

With clustering and blade racks, it does not matter how unstable an OS is and solaris is irrelevant.

Wintel and lintel is the key and brings in more bang for the buck in such an environment. Solaris nodes underperform and are expensive. If they break, just replace them with another.

Read the comments? They do not bash Sun as garbage. They only state the obvious about price and how the big features are no longer needed and overpriced for %95 of most uses.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[oconnorcjo]

Cut to the posts here by people that probably have never seen a Sun box let alone owned/used one and I'm not shocked.

I went to the University at Bufalo back when Sun Machines were everywhere one turned. I now hear that many of those computer rooms today have x86 and Linux and it does not surprise me. Sun hardware is overpriced for what they provide for the average user's tasks and it shows in the fact that Sun boxes (in conservative financial institutions on Wall Street to radical and evershifting R&D facilities on Coleges and research labratories) have been replaced with x86/Linux boxes. Even people who like and know Sun hardware think they are not the best value in many circumstances.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[HrothgarReborn]

If its about the OS then why does this thing come with Solaris 8? I mean we are talking about a workstation.
Solaris 8 is an OS that is still designed to use telnet to shell places with no support for ssh built into the OS. Forget any useful admin tools like sudo, dig or tcpdump. Launch X and see the ugliest window manager made by man. Maybe after you install openssh, vim, gnome, openoffice, and Mozilla you might get that archaic Solaris 8 to be just functional enough to remind you how much you miss your favorite Linux distro.
For that price I'll buy a G5. Heck, for that price I'll buy 2 G5's!

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[sapbasisnerd]

It looks like both of the contenders for the 64-bit x86 replacement (ia64 and x86-64, of course) are going to be very SMP capable I wouldn't count on that, so far for the application benchmarks I've seen IA-64 SMP scaling above 8 way sucks wind. Not as bad as Sunfire/Starcat but not as good as IBM POWER or Alpha for that matter.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[prockcore]

Keep support for the hardware only and put Suse 7.3 Sparc on it.

We've thought of doing that.. but not to save money (our sun contracts only cover the hardware as it is) Compiling something on Solaris versus compiling on Linux is night and day... the GNU environment is just so much better.

Installing libXML2 and libXSLT took several days of troubleshooting. Sunfreeware is outdated, and we needed the latest versions to do some of the stuff we wanted.

However, some of our systems are almost 10 years old now, and the support contracts for the hardware alone are tens of thousands of dollars per year. For what we're paying in hardware support, we could buy new Sparcs every year.

That's the price of inertia I guess.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[freedom1776]

Cost? I purchase Sun every few months at work. An IDE based v100 1u single proc can be had for $1000 (configured in a web farm) A SCSI based v120 1u single proc can be had for $2000. (configured to run an Informix database) These are list prices on the Web. I get them for 20% discount usually. Plus you can use standard memory / ide / scsi so get that from a third party. I just don't get where the Sun is costly comes from? Low end servers compare to Dell servers comparably. Lights out management (LOM) kicks @55 on a Sun.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[ajagci]

It's never a suprised that people on slashdot just don't get Sun equipment.

I used to buy Sun machines by the dozens--back when they gave me good bang-for-the-buck and when they were the best of the UNIX workstation bunch (of course, even back then, it was GNU software that made Solaris tolerable). Today, PCs give me more bang-for-the-buck and Linux and BSD have become far better operating systems, so there is no reason to like or advocate Sun workstations anymore.

Much like Apple, companies (I'd wager extremely few people buy Sun's for personal everyday use) that buy these boxes are buying them for the OS and rarely for the groundbreaking hardware.

Sure: they buy them for the OS. But that's not because there is anything particularly great about Solaris, it's because they want backwards compatibility.

Note that people used to use Sun workstations for personal everyday use, back when they were reasonably priced, performed well, and still represented the state-of-the-art in UNIX-like desktop systems. No more, however.

I seriously doubt that there are many businesses who switch to Solaris--Sun is living off repeat business now. Almost anybody who has a choice for a new project starts off with Linux, BSD, or NT these days.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[ajagci]

These are also the same people who enjoy particpating in system administration discussions when their system administration experience only stems from the 4 boxes they have at home.

Yes, and that's how SunOS itself originally became big, then Windows NT, then Linux. Face it, people start small and then both their projects and their needs grow.

If a company can't offer good value and good performance on the low end, they are doomed because only a few, select people who happen to be running big systems will buy them. That kind of arrogance killed most mainframe vendors and nearly did IBM in.

Of course, even as far as big systems and large networks are concerned, I think Sun has very little to offer that's competitive, but that's a separate discussion.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[shaitand]

I can get you a dual operteron pc with scsi drives for $1000 or less. That's were people get that Sun is costly. As for Dell, Dell is costly as well. All of the major vendors are a ripoff.

Solaris doesn't offer you anything linux doesn't in terms of OS stability these days. You want support? Every piece of that hardware comes with at LEAST a 3yr warranty. The OS support contracts are cheaper as well.

Don't have time to assemble? This job doesn't exactly take expertise, hire in a couple teenage monkeys to assemble the systems for $6/hr. You can have them assemble 100 systems for what you saved on a single Sun box.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[forgotmypassword]

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)!

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[bruthasj]

Wow, 90%? That seems like a conservative number.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[freedom1776]

Show me where you can build a dual opteron pc with scsi drives for less than $1000. It has to be 1u and have (LOM). LOM is power on / power off via a serial or 10baseT port. Oh yeah... and hot swappable drives for scsi. Is the scsi ultra320?

I've assembled systems now and again.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[tanveer1979]

They like the support that Sun provides with thier OS and how it's been grown to be rock solid. Yada, yada, yada. Cut to the posts here by people that probably have never seen a Sun box let alone owned/used one and I'm not shocked.

I am on a sun Box. I am posting for it. this machine is been running for Last 6 years. Its an Ultra 10 440MHz. Reliability means Sun, nothing else.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[BJH]

The 6800s we use at work have had memory module problems at least four times in the last year.

Last time it happened we were in the middle of a trading day (stockbroking firm) and the managers weren't very happy about it...

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[MROD]

The Blade 1500 is merely the replacement for the venerable old Ultra 10 which has been in production now for at least six years now.

Guess what that had.. Yes, a slowish IDE hard disk etc. etc. etc. and still outsold all the other workstation types 'cos it was relatively cheap (for a Sun) and hit the performance sweet spot, as in it wasn't totally crippled by the tiny cache in the Ultra 5 (and now Blade 100/150).

For general computing they're OK machines. They're nothing exciting but are rock solid in reliability terms.

I noticed in the article that the author quibbled at the reliability and suitability of items such as the power supply, hard disk and DVD drive. On the first count, SPARCs take a great deal less power than the current crop of x86 processors. Secondly, remember, Sun support these boxes for YEARS, and I mean many years. These machines sit plodding away running menial jobs and probably get replaced on a five to ten year cycle in some cases. All this time, Sun has to support the hardware. If, there was an inherent weekness in a component then Sun would generally avoid it for its own support cost reasons.

I work for a science department in a UK university and we have old Sun boxes still running which are coming up to their tenth birthday (actually, I've just retired our last SPARCstation 2!). No-one can say that these machines are fast, but they did their job well enough that they kept going. Speed isn't everything.

As for PCs, I think the oldest is something like Pentium 75MHz, we've just got rid of our last Apple Mac SE/30 too. ;-)

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[0x0d0a]

These are also the same people who enjoy particpating in system administration discussions when their system administration experience only stems from the 4 boxes they have at home.

Remember that Linux was written by people at home who liked dicking about with computers before you criticize too harshly.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[enigmatichmachine]

So, in the end, i think what we can all agree on is that sun boxes are expensive, and have their highly specific purposes that they are good for, but also that those porpose are rapidly being overran by commidity hardware and Linux. now if all the fanboys on either side could just calm down, we can all discuss the immenent death of sun calmly and civilly... oh, wait... that was the whole porpose of this article to begin with...

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[zzztkf]

>The Sparcstation 2 has to have been one of the best workstations ever made.

I can't agree with you more than I do. SparcStation2 with SunOS4.1.3 or 4.1.4 were the best combination I have ever seen.
Actually those combination was the first Sun machine I have ever used. It's so beautifully engineered it's quite pleasant expericnce to look inside of books when upating CPU or adding memory.

I'm really sad to see that SUN is so behind market.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[Arker]

Of course not. But, like I said, take a look at IBMs wares if you need that sort of capability.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[TheLink]

I'm willing to bet that the new Sun boxes are not built the same as the old ones. Esp the cheaper ones.

Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water...

[ChrisMaple]

A day at a time isn't at all helpful when running a simulation that takes three days. Four years ago I was running IC design software on Sun machines and had to call the sysadmin at home perhaps a half dozen times at 10PM when hardware failures crashed the network and license servers. The most common failures were the tape backup and the RAID system, neither of which should have crashed the network and both of which did. The failing systems were neither Sun nor X86 hardware, but rather Unix and network hardware specialist products that sold for very high prices and were unrepairable only 2 years after purchase. The tape backup was particularly bad; its software never worked properly.

Sun's hardware support was so expensive we were better off fixing stuff ourselves. Software support was mostly beyond what I saw, but what little I did see was responses of "yes, what you see going wrong is indeed what the software does" and hoping that the "quarterly" patches would fix things. BAH.

Re:Brings value?

[VirexEye]

How can it bring value to any market when you can do the job on a less expensive piece of hardware?

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.

Re:Ouch, my FACE.

[Lispy]

Its not only ugly it s also looking lame. And for such an expensive machine my shiny Sun better look cool. I don t get it. Sun had some pretty nice designs but this looks even worse than many stock Intelboxes from walmart...

cu,
Lispy

oh the irony

[DrSkwid]

incompetant

did you mean incompetent ?

Sun trying to compete with AMD/Intel desktops?

[tr0llb4rt0]

Most Sun Workstations are used with vast banks of Sun servers or mainframe systems to provide the GRUNT!

It seems they are being drawn to raw workstation power like a moth to a flame.

There core hardware (and software) is EXCELLENT but it's not appropriate for joe-six-packs performance desktop system.

Concentrate on the research/business systems guys.

Re: Sun trying to compete with AMD/Intel desktops?

[C10H14N2]

There are a couple reasons behind SUN's success in research that have nothing to do with individual price/performance.

First, just look at the name. SUN=Stanford University Network. Mmmkay. Check.

Second, look at their pricing structure. You can fill an entire academic division with SUN equipment for what I spent outfitting my home office with a modestly huge stack of x86 boxes. They have DEEP discounts for academic research.

Third, their servers are huge and if you can bundle up a stack or workstations and thin clients with your PO for your servers and have an uniform operating environment are you going to run and buy a stack of DELLS and then try to shoehorn in some slapjob of an authentication system? Uhm, no.

Last, if you spent years in academic research and then shuffle off to whore yourself off to corporate IT, who are you going to call?

It's precisely the same marketing strategy MS and Apple have been using since day one to get the general user on their platforms. No mystery here.

Re:Brings value?

[beakburke]

I hardly think your dell with it's one 3.06 GHz P4 is going to be faster than the dual 1.8GHz mac. Did the dell have a 180GB HD? You did get the RAM right though. You have to check more than just the CPU speed and the amount of RAM. Plus you forget that Apple includes much better software out of box than what Dell gives you. Better price that out again.

Correct me if I'm wrong...

[revolvement]

...but with the power of the x86 processors, not to mention the plethora of software available for them, is there really THAT big of a market for UltraSPARC machines(Other than those who would buy one just to say they have one)?

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong...

[SiliconJesus]

Briefly stated, you're wrong. I'm a sysadmin for both Solaris and Linux, and trust me, both have their place in the Enterprise. When you're looking for a good overall performer, and speed is more important than overall efficiency, Linux is GREAT, especially for webservers and other similar tasks. When you're talking about applications such as Oracle, you need the big iron that Sun can deliver pushing the envelope of performance on more robust systems.

Personally, I'm going to be getting a 1500 or 2500 in the next few weeks at work (still haven't decided which to buy). I have a SGI Indigo2, an Ultra 1, a few x86 based machines, an AIX server, HP-UX server, and a microVAX. Each has one or two things that they're good for (like, only the SGI or x86 systems make good desktops), but together you start to see why each flavor of *NIX has its own quirks, and value. Each job has a tool best suited for it, and x86 / Linux / BSD isn't always the right answer.

Re:Correct me if I'm wrong...

[sad_]

When you're looking for a good overall performer, and speed is more important than overall efficiency, Linux is GREAT, especially for webservers and other similar tasks. When you're talking about applications such as Oracle, you need the big iron that Sun can deliver pushing the envelope of performance on more robust systems.

Except Oracle doesn't seem to think that anymore. As they are converting slowly but surely to linux. with their argument you don't need highly available hardware as RAC can handle failing servers.
Also what is anybody holding back building a high quality box running on cheaper intel/amd (even 64bit) machines? Combine that with the 2.6 kernel based distributions comming in the next 6 months or so and gone are all the SUN advantages. No, don't even give me that crap about support because you can get the same level of support from HP for example for Itanium machines as for their HP9000 pieces of crap. (those Itanium machines from HP are in fact identical for Linux or HPUX, same build quality&features)

Re:Brings value?

[Mr. Darl McBride]

Are you familiar with the applications that are certified to run on Sun workstations? Not all have been ported to Linux.

Considering the cost of those applications and the relative ease of porting to Linux, I'm sure the sellers would be more than happy to do the port if the customer demanded it.

That said, when you're dealing with a $500k/seat scientific visualization package, there's a good chance you aren't worried about another $4k for the box it runs on.

Re:Brings value?

[Arae]

I disagree; I would say Solaris is the biggest reason why Sun have loyal customers.

90%?

[rebelcool]

More like 99%.. for supposed nerds, you'd think more of them would have more of a clue about the various facets of computing.

Re:90%?

[DavittJPotter]

This, from a guy with a nick from a movie called "Hackers"? Oh, the irony...

Re:90%?

[BJH]

Any OS that spontaneously reboots when a non-system filesystem fills up is not robust, sorry to say.

If you'd actually administered Sun machines, you'd know that that's a mount-time option; it doesn't have to reboot.

why is it pre-installed with solaris 8?

[RouterSlayer]

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...

Re:why is it pre-installed with solaris 8?

[0racle]

Take a closer look at the revision number of the Solaris 8 that ships on this system, its the Hardware revision 5/03, (May/2003) Its been updated, and support made specifically for Solaris 8 for this machine, its about as 'old' as Solaris 9 is.

I havent used , I've only had the oppertuity to use 8 on intel, and have a older sparc here and will install 8 on it when I set it up, either way, 8 is not old (useless), and I would assume there is less OS overhead on the system being it is a little older (age) then 9 has. But again, thats only an assumption.

Re:why is it pre-installed with solaris 8?

[nkrgovic]

Because there is no Solaris 9 port for either this, or the Blade 2500 workstation yet! It's supposed to be out around April.

Now, to performance:

On both workstations you can get XVR-600 which is lightning fast and extra high quality. It's a Wildcat 4 chip (3D Labs) with 10-bit pixel precision and dedicated texture ram. The least expensive card like this for the PC is around $1K5 (Wildcat 4 7110) Also you can't get Linux drivers for it yet.

As for the P4/1.8GHz story try this for a test : Install MySQL on your linux PC and create a database with a table of about 5-6GB. Run alter table on it. Wait for it CRUMBLE TO DUST as it hits past 2GBs. Then get a Sun.

Opteron might be the only challenger to sparc (which is why Sun is pushing for opteron-based servers), but it's main faults are :

Still has no real applications ported to it.

Can't scale beyond 8-cpu's. If you don't need that - well... Plenty people do - in servers at least. This isn't a workstation issue, but is a server one.

Integrated memory controllers are a bitch on multi-cpu systems if you need one cpu to access all memory, while the other is still doing something. This is the main reason why sun still sells Blade 2000, now that Blade 2500 has hit the market.

As for true workstation features check out Blade 2000 (2 cpu's, UPA graphics, FC-AL disks), or Blade 2500 (2 cpu's, scsi disks). Both more expensive (especially Blade 2000 which uses Ultra III CPU's without integrated memory controllers, but with a real crossbar switch instead), but they are still A LOT less expensive than their SGI or IBM counterparts. Sun isn't competing with the PC's with this WS, it's just for the people who need a cheap ws for home, remote work or something like that. As the author of the article puts it "make no mistake: this is a workhorse, not a pony or a racehorse"

Re:why is it pre-installed with solaris 8?

[CmdrTHAC0]

"As for the P4/1.8GHz story try this for a test : Install MySQL on your linux PC and create a database with a table of about 5-6GB. Run alter table on it. Wait for it CRUMBLE TO DUST as it hits past 2GBs. Then get a Sun."

No way would I ever use a toy like MySQL if I had the option of Oracle, DB2, or even PostgreSQL. News flash for you: real software uses the 64-bit I/O calls.

Re:why is it pre-installed with solaris 8?

[colins]

The Wildcat4 7110 is a dual headed card, with 256MB of RAM (128MB frame buffer, 128MB texture ram). The XVR-600 has half the RAM and is single headed. You'd need to buy two XVR-600s to do what one 7110 can do. Also, the 7110 is an 8x AGP card, Sun doesn't do AGP, so you get a lesser 64bit 66Mhz PCI version.

You claim it's lightning fast - care to share some Viewperf stats? Sun's OpenGL drivers for the Expert3D (also 3DLabs based) were never stellar and took a while to become stable.

I'm betting a $500 Quadro4 980XGL will give you better performance under Linux than the XVR-600 does under Solaris. And the Blade 1500 holds a maximum 4GB of RAM (so the 64bit argument is moot for this box).

The only reason to buy the 1500 instead of a Xeon running Linux is if your stuck with a Solaris only version of your application. Otherwise, the value proposition Sun is offering with this machine is just too low.

We use Blade 2000s at work. Our HP Linux XW8000s run rings around them for every workload I've been able to come up with.

-cjs

Re:why is it pre-installed with solaris 8?

[IANAAC]

As for the P4/1.8GHz story try this for a test : Install MySQL on your linux PC and create a database with a table of about 5-6GB. Run alter table on it. Wait for it CRUMBLE TO DUST as it hits past 2GBs. Then get a Sun.

Now create that same database with MySQL on a Sun box (I don't think you can get > 3.2 for Solaris) and watch it crumble as well. It's not Linux or any other OS, for that matter... it's MySQL that dies.

My School's Unix lab

[ImTwoSlick]

has about 20 Blade machines, and 8 Dell P4 machines running Red Hat Linux. Guess which ones get used?

OK, I'll spoil it. The blades NEVER get used. They are a complete waste of money and space. Who want's to use their ancient desktop, when you can do most anything on a box with KDE, OpenOffice, and the most popular development tools?

Re:My School's Unix lab

[PhilipPeake]

So why don't you use the Gnome desktop that comes as standard (if you choose to enable it) with Sun these days, and use either OpenOffice or Suns own version of that (which I believe also comes with the boxes these days?

Re:My School's Unix lab

[ImTwoSlick]

So why don't you use the Gnome desktop that comes as standard (if you choose to enable it) with Sun these days, and use either OpenOffice or Suns own version of that (which I believe also comes with the boxes these days?

Simple.. No choice. The school has either not installed it, or doesn't allow us to change anything. Besides, most people would have no clue about how to change desktops. Mostly tho, it's about the lack of useful software on these machines. The total number of useful applications on the Linux machines simply dwarf the Blades. There is one guy who does nothing but chat on IRC and surf porn all day, and he's the ONLY person who regularly uses the blades. :-) I think we should still have some Blade computers, but only have six, and make all the rest Linux systems.

Re:My School's Unix lab

[f16c]

My School runs Sun servers ONLY for programming courses. If you want to do a project in C++, Perl or Java then you have the choice of vi, pico or emacs and the code better work with CC or JDK 1.4 (the perl is a bit older). That's what's on the system. Floppies be damned. I do my projects from home on cli using ssh under Linux. You hardly need to be a Solaris guru to do this.
We had a Blade 100 in our development lab at work for a single contract. After that portion of the contract ended the hardware was shipped to a warehouse. Too ugly for a desktop, too slow for normal UNIX apps. I do not miss it.

Re:My School's Unix lab

[zz99]

True, Solaris comes with CDE (and even OpenLook, if you prefer a really old UI), both IMHO less than usefull. But Sun also supports GNOME, and you get StarOffice with every Solaris license you buy.

Anyway, you complaints are hardly Sun's fault. You should blame your admin. At work we have Sun workstations with KDE 3, gcc, Mozilla and most of the other things I have at my Linux box at home

Re:Brings value?

[cehardin]

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.

Acorn did it in '82

[DrSkwid]

with a Z80 for the 6502 based BBC Micro so you could run CP/M

Re:Acorn did it in '82

[dbirchall]

And Commodore included a Z80 in its 128, for the same reason. Yep, lots of people have tried this routine...I'll take a decent software-based emulator any day.

Re:Acorn did it in '82

[G27 Radio]

Microsoft made a Z-80 card for the Apple ][+ way back in the day for CPM apps as well. I used to own one.

Re:Acorn did it in '82

[calidoscope]

Microsoft made a Z-80 card for the Apple ][+ way back in the day for CPM apps

A little bit of history - that card was originally designed by Seattle Computer Products - who later wrote Q/86/MS-DOS. SCP ended up getting shafted by MS both times.

Read the article till the end...

[dark-br]

Quote from the article Conclusion:

It can't touch high-end 32-bit machines in terms of raw performance, but the opportunities it presents for industrial environments are undeniable. 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. Solaris UNIX itself is one of the top proprietary UNIXes on the market, offering a level of stability, reliability, and efficiency that you need in an industrial environment. One thing you don't want to have to mess with is the operating system, and once Solaris 8 is set up and running properly (which Sun can do for you before the system is even shipped, or can help you with after the system is installed at your business) it will basically run forever without incident. Solaris 9 support should be along in Q2 2004.

So it's not a matter of speed, is a matter of what's it for and what you will be running on it.

So?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It's OK for Apple, but not Sun, to sell overpriced machines now?

~~~

Fact:

[Anonymous Coward]

It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: Sun's new UltraSPARC workstation: the Blade 1500 is dying.

Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered UltraSPARC community when recently IDC confirmed that Sun's new UltraSPARC workstation: the Blade 1500 accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Sun's new UltraSPARC workstation: the Blade 1500 has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Sun's new UltraSPARC workstation: the Blade 1500 is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Sun's new UltraSPARC workstation: the Blade 1500's future. The hand writing is on the wall: ULTRASparc faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for the Blade 1500 because Sun's new UltraSPARC workstation: the Blade 1500 is dying. Things are looking very bad for Sun's new UltraSPARC workstation: the Blade 1500. As many of us are already aware, Sun's new UltraSPARC workstation: the Blade 1500 continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. SunSparc is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Sun developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: the Blade 1500 is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenSun. How many users of NetSun are there? Let's see. The number of OpenSun versus NetSun posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 SunBSD users. Sun/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetSunposts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Sun/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *Sun market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeSun users. This is consistent with the number of FreeSun Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeSun went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *Sun has steadily declined in market share. *Sun is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If the Blade 1500 is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *Sun continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *Sun is dead.

Fact: Sun's new UltraSPARC workstation: the Blade 1500 is dead

Re:Ouch, my FACE.

[bhtooefr]

OK, well, I looked at the back. It's an ordinary ATX (Mini-ATX, five slots instead of seven) case, and therefore board, so buy an ATX case, grab the board and PSU (VERY important, as it's a custom PSU), and throw it in. Voila, no more fugliness. BTW, I'd rather just throw in either a P4 board with PowerLeap Pentium M to Pentium 4 adaptor (they'll release it yet), or a Socket 754 board.

Re:The SunPCI card is cool

[sgifford]

I thought it sounded cool, too. I wondered if I could stick one in my x86 Linux box to boot Windows on---like VMware, only faster and without slowing down my existing machine.

Anybody know if this is possible?

He doesn't get it...

[PhunkySchtuff]

The reviewer just doesn't get it. The reason you get a machine like this is so that you can run the same software, unchanged, on your big 32 or 64 CPU fridge-sized machine in the back room as you can on your desktop workstation. You run the same OS, the same binaries, use the same dev tools and you just know it will work. If it doesn't work, someone from Sun will be around to fix it, quickly.
As for going on about the "Restrictive" license surrounding Solaris. For fuck's sake, it's FREE (as in beer) to download and use - for Sparc and Intel.
And then there are automatic software updates that you have to accept? WTF? is he on drugs?
Sun have recommended patch clusters (AKA Service Packs) and individual patches that you are free to download and install as you choose. There's nothing compulsory about them.
Oh, and there's no.... RESET BUTTON!
I dunno about anyone else who uses Solaris out there, but I've _never_ seen a Sun machine lock up hard, such that a Reset Button would have been the solution...
Stick to reviewing your latest 0verclocked AMD with peltier and watercooling and neon casemods...
- k

Re:He doesn't get it...

[11223]

Wow. Not actually used a Sun recently, have you? Just as an FYI, the el-cheeso IDE chipset they use in the modern Blades, especially the 150, locks up the machine hard quite often. I've seen other machines that have had random lockups for no good reason, even after most of the hardware is replaced. I'm sorry, but no Sun workstation since the Ultra 60 has offered anything near that level of reliability; today they're just Emachines with SPARCs. It's kind of sad, but at least Apple offers good, reliable UNIX workstations these days.

Re:He doesn't get it...

[axxackall]

I dunno about anyone else who uses Solaris out there, but I've _never_ seen a Sun machine lock up hard, such that a Reset Button would have been the solution...

Here is the list of equipment locked up to the point we had turn off power in order to make it running again:

• Ultra-10
• Enterprise E450
• Enterprise E4500

In any next project we would need something big that cannot be x86 - I would strongly recommend Power4 or G5 based big irons.

Re:He doesn't get it...

[bonfire]

> Oh, and there's no.... RESET BUTTON!
> I dunno about anyone else who uses Solaris out there, but > I've _never_ seen a Sun machine lock up hard, such that a > Reset Button would have been the solution...

El cheapo IDE/PCI Suns (Ultra 5 and co.) do. But then the author of the article perhaps hasn't come across , "sync", "reset". :)

PD

Re:He doesn't get it...

[bonfire]

Meh, add a "stop-a" in there.

Re:He doesn't get it...

[11223]

I've been in the same situation. I've had Sun replace everything but the power supply on a machine and still have it experience inexplicable lockups. In that time I did not get the impression that Sun support knew what the hell they were doing.

Re:He doesn't get it...

[(H)elix1]

I dunno about anyone else who uses Solaris out there, but I've _never_ seen a Sun machine lock up hard, such that a Reset Button would have been the solution...

/me hanging head in shame over some really krufty C++ code last week.

Re:He doesn't get it...

[bruthasj]

You've never used NIS and NFS before. It's nasty, trust me.

Re:He doesn't get it...

[MROD]

Yes, I laughed at the reset button jibe.

The last thing you want on a machine such as this is a reset button. You don't want the users treating as a PC and resetting it when they can't log in 'cos they've got caps lock on when trying to type their password.

Of course, if you really want to halt the machine in a panic there's always L1-A (oh, sorry, it's Stop-A now isn't it?).

I also found it a little amusing that he griped about the mouse being ball based.. Of course, Sun had been a ground breaking leader in ball-less optical mice way back in the 1980's but went back to ball based mice only about seven or eight years ago 'cos that's what the customers wanted.

Re:He doesn't get it...

[adam613]

Everything but the power supply? When I see an x86 box that experiences inexplicable hard lockups, the power supply is the FIRST thing I check, and that's the solution almost half the time. Understandably, I found your post highly amusing.

Re:He doesn't get it...

[Mr. Piddle]

I did not get the impression that Sun support knew what the hell they were doing.

Did they hook up a serial console and enable boot-time hardware diagnostics? The diagnostics output of Sun workstations is very thorough. A system that won't even boot the OS can generally be diagnosed down to one or two components to actually try swapping out, even if the CPU itself is fried.

Re:He doesn't get it...

[Craig Davison]

That, and the old optical mice sucked. You needed a special (and expensive to replace) mousepad for them. The motion was really choppy too. I used one of these old mice on an early sun4 (possibly a SparcStation 2).

Re:He doesn't get it...

[Craig Davison]

Here's a picture if anyone's wondering what I'm talking about. The pads had a strange reflective/black dot pattern on them.

Sun Blade 2000 - 2x UltraSPARC III+

[aSiTiC]

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.

Re:Sun Blade 2000 - 2x UltraSPARC III+

[Anonymous Coward]

The Sun Blade computed at nearly 3X the speed of the Pentium 4.

----

If it rans three times faster what's the problem? Also, are you sure you should be the one writing these computational programs? I don't know how you could with a statement like "due to FP instruction sets not being available". What program are you in?

Re:Sun Blade 2000 - 2x UltraSPARC III+

[SoupIsGood Food]

It's a matter of matching the software to the hardware. If you run commodity software designed for commodity systems, you're going to get better results from the dual x86 box. If you run a software environment designed for Solaris and UltraSPARCIII, you're going to see significant speed advantages... and you're already seeing a 3x speed bump in your application on a platform it's not optimized for.

Still, if that's not enough extra oomph, look into Fujitsu's SPARC clones. They can outpace Itanium and Alpha systems, and are less money than Sun-branded boxes. Sun's contracted with Fujitsu for future SPARC development, so the performance gap will be widening. The systems will still be ludicrously expensive. Whether the investment in bigger iron will be worth it depends on how parallelizable your code is. Sometimes two big CPUs trump a bunch of teensy ones (Amdahl's law and all that)... sometimes a grid application running on a hundred different systems in the office as a screen saver will do the trick.

SoupIsGood Food

Re:Sun Blade 2000 - 2x UltraSPARC III+

[LadyLucky]

I profiled our Java app on windows... only it ran like such a dog, ate memory, and killed the machine. So I ran the profiler on a sun blade (900MHz SPARC), and it ran like a champ. Ever since then, I have understood why people have Sun hardware.

Re:Sun Blade 2000 - 2x UltraSPARC III+

[TheSunborn]

Because suns port of jre to windows is buggy?

Re:Sun Blade 2000 - 2x UltraSPARC III+

[owlstead]

It's not so much buggy as that the Win 32 system is not really build for Java. The multitasking and process handling just don't fit right. I've never seen JRE bugs on MS (not including the MS port, which was fast but broken).

Re:Sun Blade 2000 - 2x UltraSPARC III+

[Billly Gates]

Your full of shit.

Name one and I mean one benchmark that proves this?

All including FPU and even actual real use like chip design all show lintel ahead.

Re:Sun Blade 2000 - 2x UltraSPARC III+

[aSiTiC]

I think I did. I wrote a program I wrote in Matlab that showed these results.

Re:Sun Blade 2000 - 2x UltraSPARC III+

[T-Ranger]

The question is: Did you write a benchmark program that was desigined in a hardware-neutral way? Or did you write a program to do X, highly optimized to do it the Sun/UltraSparc/Solaris way, but also managed to get it to run on a lintel box?

Re:Sun Blade 2000 - 2x UltraSPARC III+

[0x0d0a]

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...

Just wanted to point out that one is running on a laptop, which could have processor cycling involved, unless you're sure that that's not the case.

I also realize Matlab runs poorly on Unix due to FP instruction sets not being available.

Okay, now this went right over my head. Durrr...what? I admit that I haven't used MATLAB on *IX for a while, but I see no reason that floating point instructions couldn't be used by MATLAB, just as they are in every other program using floating point numbers on my system.

Re:Sun Blade 2000 - 2x UltraSPARC III+

[imsabbel]

was the laptop plugged in?
Many laptops with high end p4 (which need >80W in full mode) clock them down to as low as 600MHz when running from batteries.

Re:Sun Blade 2000 - 2x UltraSPARC III+

[TheLink]

"The Sun Blade computed at nearly 3X the speed of the Pentium 4."

Are you sure you mean what you wrote?

Or did you mean to say that the Sun Blade took 3X longer than the P4 e.g. 3X slower.

3X the speed generally means 3X faster.

I find it hard to believe that a Sun Blade would be 3X faster than a P4 for something like Matlab.

Re:Sun Blade 2000 - 2x UltraSPARC III+

[LadyLucky]

Yeah... I don't know what it is about windows and Java, but something doesn't sit right. When you kick up a lot of threads... especially ones that do I/O, the whole machine grinds to a halt. It's really quite obvious when compared with a Sun box. I rememver reading some time ago that the Windows scheduler boosts the priority 'by an unspecified amount for an unspecified length of time' of any thread doing IO. I suspect this behaviour (which is good for desktops) is sucky for Java, especially with its thread-blocking IO model.

*sigh*

Totally amazed and delighted :)

[O2dude]

I never thought I;d see the day when SGI's entry level MIPS-based desktop product - the now several years old Fuel box - would seem an attractive buy compared to anything else on the market.

The Sun blade 1500 surely must be the lamest piece of PeeCee-inspired 'Top Tier' vendor junk ever conceived.

Go SGI go!

Re:Ouch, my FACE.

[Oggust]

You should see a Netra T1/t1/X1/Sunfire v120. They are 1RU servers, and they have a sun logo all over the top face. Ah. found a picture. I thought it was pretty cool though, and it isn't visible in the rack.

I wish more vendors would do what IBM did with the x445, and US Robotics did in the 80s and include as much of the manual as you can on the actual machine.

/August

Re:Brings value?

[Zeinfeld]

How can Apple sell hardware? I mean, how could they possibly sell a single Mac? /me types away on my PowerMac G5

It is not the price issue, clearly doing the job is not the same as doing the job well, doing it quickly or doing it easily.

Linux is not on a par with the very best commercial O/S in terms of smooth integration. Which does not matter for most nerd types, Linux is good enough and the benefits of being able to fix it when it is broken is often a bigger advantage.

But Apple is certainly at least as good as Sun at providing a smooth integrated O/S that just works. It is a long time since I have used a Sun machine, when I did back in 1995 their integration was pathetic, they had all this multimedia gubbins and none of the drivers worked. It was worth paying the premium for Dec hardware.

For at least five years Intel boxes have been more than sufficient for most needs and Linux has looked at least as good as Solaris so why pay five times the price?

Apple hardware fetches a premium, but not a huge premium. It makes a lot of sense if you want a Unix machine, you get a product that is well integrated, things work as you expect them to. That is worth real money.

The only reason people buy Sun is that there is quite a bit of enterprise software that only runs on Sun or Windows NT.

The reviewer is missing the point

[jdigital]

Disclaimer: I was a sun nut. I have moved to Linux/x86 as it is cheaper; so take everything with a grain of salt. However, it is quite clear that most of the complaints raised in the article stem from "i'm not used to solaris/sun, therefore its not good", rather than any intrinsic complaints.

That means that you can have Windows XP Pro running in a window in CDE (the standard UNIX desktop environment) or on a separate monitor that can be connected to the SunPCI card itself. This is not a software emulator -- it's actually Windows XP running on the SunPCI through Solaris -- so there is no measurable loss in performance while using the SunPCI.

1. SunPCI cards have been around for a while
2. Apple used to do this
3. In the late 80's I had a 8088 ISA daughterboard which sat inside my 8086.
4. There is a performance loss. On my Ultra workstation I ran a development database, and used the SunPCI for Outlook and other things. The SunPCI card maps 'C:' to a file sitting in your home directory. There is contention for the drive. Addition of another drive fixes this.

The keyboard and mouse (which add $25 to the cost of the machine) can best be described as "painful." Extremely painful.

1. Keyboards are a pretty personal issue. Without saying what he/she felt was wrong, most people will not know whether their experience will be similar.
2. From my experience with sun keyboards from IPX's to Ultra's, I've found them quite to my liking.
3. The complaints about the size of the keyboard and the redundant keys just illustrates a lack of knowledge of how useful they can be.

Solaris is an excellent operating system in terms of stability, reliability, and professional support, but you'll find it quite difficult to set up and maintain it on your own and it can be difficult to find much software for it.

1. sunfreeware.com
2. This guy is contradicting himself. He states in the opening line that there is excellent professional support, but later complains that there is no large friendly support community. In my experience, I've only ever needed to contact Sun when the sh*t has hit the fan. Most of my support came from many of the useful sun related lists and web pages. GIYF (google is your friend)
3. ...plan on spending some time every now and then fooling with installing various programs and editing files just so you can get Linux binary compatibility or even just install a simple program like The GIMP.... Um, download required libraries or packages, build/install. Compile GIMP, run GIMP. Sounds pretty familiar to the Linux experience to me. What crack was he on with "Linux binary compatibility...".

Solaris in its current form can never be Free Software or even open-source because of all of the proprietary code that it contains.

1. I have the Solaris 8 Intel and SPARC source CD's sitting right here. They were available to purchase for around $40 from sun.com a year back or so. This offer was open to everyone. I'm just a hobbyist dude, not a governmental organisation, eductaional institution -- i.e., I certainly stand no chance in hell of getting the Windows XP source code.
2. The entire section on Licencing is just meaningless crap.

The conclusion gets it spot on:

It serves unique purposes in many important industries, in niches that IA32 (x86) or Apple PPC systems cannot support due to software and architectural constraints, therefore it cannot truly be compared with such systems. If it stands up to other machines in its class is a determination that I have yet to make...

Re:The reviewer is missing the point

[11223]

Unfortunatley there are few workstation-side architectural constraints these days that would force the use of a Sun instead of an Itanic, AIX, or G5. All of these computers have excellent I/O bandwidth, where modern Suns have crappy disk controllers. The disk expansion options for Suns are just pathetic - for the price, you might as well just buy a G5 and an Xserve RAID.

I'm a longtime Sun user, and I still own several. But Sun has had a major downward slide in workstation quality over the past few years, esp with my experiences admining a lab of Blade 150s. Hopefully I can replace them with eMacs soon.

Re:The reviewer is missing the point

[batura]

Um, download required libraries or packages, build/install. Compile GIMP, run GIMP. Sounds pretty familiar to the Linux experience to me. What crack was he on with "Linux binary compatibility...".

It isn't a familiar linux experiance if the guy writing in was a scrub that thought RPMs were how linux software was really distributed.

Re:The reviewer is missing the point

[jdigital]

:)

or just spend about 15 seconds going to
http://www.sunfreeware.com/programlistsparc8.h tml#gimp

Worthless article

[Anonymous Coward]

I lost any faith in this guys capability to do a serious review when I noticed he was using a Java based SpecInt benchmarking tool. The Spec scores suck on just about any risc cpu. Take a look and you will see according to spec scores a sunblade 150 wastes a 4 way IBM P-Series machine.
So not only is the benchmark worthless he benchmarked Java's performance.
This machine is meant to replace all of the 7-8 year old Ultra 5's and 10's still in production, not play quake 3 or whatever the latest is out there.

Hammers and Screwdrivers

[Weaselmancer]

I'd second the idea that the reviewer doesn't entirely understand the target audience for this machine.

The article also includes a link to the product's PDF datasheet. Please read before you bash.

But just in case you don't feel like skimming through the PDF, the relevant points seem to be that it:

• Is meant to run Solaris
• Is compatible with Sun's XVR graphics accelerators
• Has built-in 10/100/1000 ethernet capability

To me, this looks like a box intended to do hugely accelerated 3D graphics in a unixish environment. That's it's niche. I'd bet it's 3D rendering performance is nothing short of stunning.

Remember - big companies have marketing departments, entire sections of the building dedicated to answering the question "what should we charge for it?" For someone who needs a machine like this I'll bet that it's worth every penny.

Saying that it sucks because it's dhrystone score is as low as a box 1/5th it's cost is like complaining that a hammer makes a lousy screwdriver. You're not using the tool for its intended job.

Weaselmancer

Too different in their markets to compare

[mnmn]

the system barely performs on the level of a P4 1.8ghz machine ...

It was never supposed to compete there, else they would market it like Apple. These workstations are awesome for companies that NEED something to run their solaris/sparc apps faster. Ive heard of many engineering and visualization apps that still run on SGI and Sun workstations and those apps alone can run these two companies.

Sun has been open about trying to move to Operton and possibly Linux for later platforms. But just like Microsoft has complete dominance due to the sheer number of win32-only apps out there, Sun can bring out sub-P4 workstations, sell them at $5k and pay their employees with just that. I believe the sparc/solaris platform still has some kick to it and some developers will even continue to develop for that platform.

Heck OpenVMS and the OS/400 are still alive and are being released on newer hardware all the time despite their companies trying to wash their hands from it. Too many companies are greedy about that mainstream win32/wintel market and arent realizing the niche markets where they can support themselves through tech busts. Sun is getting smart.

how is SPARC proprietary?

[Anonymous Coward]

I never could figure out how (Ultra)SPARC was considered proprietary. You can license the specs for it at http://www.sparc.com/

Heck, Fuji did an independent-from-Sun implementation of the UltraSPARC V processor.

I would say that Intel and AMD are more proprietary than SPARC. Or is there some place I can license the 'code' to the Pentium 4 that I don't know about?

Heck, Suns even use PCI now (previous Suns used to use SBUS).

Re:how is SPARC proprietary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even more so, Sparc is an actual IEEE standard...

Re:Yeah, but will it run...

[temojen]

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?

Sun hardware

[saunabad]

From the article: The keyboard and mouse (which add $25 to the cost of the machine) can best be described as "painful." Extremely painful. I couldn't use them for more than five minutes without my wrists hurting, and it is impossible for me to imagine anyone using these 80s-era throwbacks

I like this. Sun peripherals have always been able to give me the feeling that says "Listen punk, these machines are not made for fun, they are made for working. If this would be a pleasant experience, it wouldn't count as working, would it?"

Re:Sun hardware

[lonesometrainer]

Well, then all those Blade 100/150 machines are SUPERB work horses. Simply put, cheap crap. Compare the Sun Blade machine with a HP Visualize (the RISC version... or a real Sun server - not that netra stuff). Not that I like HPUX, but the Visualize was built for eternity. Feels like the true little brother of big iron.

So the Visualize should be a gamers dream then??? :-)

Re:Sun hardware

[er]

Oh my god. He is complaining about the 3-button mouse. Clue this guy in, THIS IS A UNIX WORKSTATION, the mouse is suppose to have 3-buttons, no more, no less and nothing else. I have never seen a Unix workstation with anything other than a 3 button mouse.

Does anyone know why Sun stopped using optical mice? (yeah, they used optical mice years ago before it was a fad)

(Just FYI, I'm typing this on a Blade 150 with a 3-button mouse)

Re:Brings value?

[iezhy]

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"

Re:Brings value?

[Gherald]

x86 Solaris, anyone?

Sun is about service

[ducomputergeek]

Enterprise level datacenters...raise their hand! If your running a SUN certified program and you upgrade and it no longer works, SUN will send someone to toubleshoot and fix it. How many other companies garuntee that? Does Red Hat? Novell? Microsoft? Um....that would be a big fat no. Too many companies, that level support is critical because the loss of say an ERP or even CRM system could mean the loss of thousands if not hundreds of the thousands of dollars.

Trust me, you can spend 5x's as much trouble shooting old software on new systems then it would have cost for "equal" performance if you had spent 3x's as much on the hardware in the first place...

Disappointed Sun Guy

[ChaosMt]

Look, I'm a long time solaris admin and I actually like to run most of my home systems on sun hardware with openbsd (can't wait to try freebsd soon; linux just doesn't work right on it yet). I love to remote console in. In the end, I have to agree with some of the author's disappointment.

First, it should be noted, you're a newbie or sucker if you're paying the retail price listed on the web site. Start your negotionations for the price by knocking of 1/3rd. This applys more for bigger systems, but it's close for small ones too. About support, skip it if this is your only system. I've found their warrenty support just fine and very helpful. However, if you're a medium sized shop, consider getting the platinum support. I've called all the big boys under super-boffo support accounts. HP has trouble just picking up the phone. IBM: we'll call you back when we found someone whom we think is who you want. Cisco: we sell that? Sun: two rings, serial number, knowledgable person opens case and starts working on it while getting [storage|OS|kernel|hardware|etc] expert on the phone, and in the mean time, the field engineer has already contacted to courier to get the new hardware there in under and hour, at three in the morning. I'm not exagerating either. Yes, this level is support is DAMN expensive, but it's comparatively cheaper than their competitors. The difference is that when you buy sun's deluxe support, they really mean it. For every other vendor, it's the same support faster.

Second, I am tired of them selling low quality workstations to their loyal users. The blade150 is flimsy and flakey; especially to those who remember the sparc2s. They were like armored pizze boxes! This new blade just looks like more of the same. The 150 has no normal way to play cds (for example). Why, oh WHY did you go with USB ports if you don't fully want to suport usb devices. The authors right about the keyboard and mouse quality. Well, it's not THAT bad - I consider the apple ones worse. But for the price, it should be much much better. Or better yet, fully support standard keyboards and mice. Map the sun keys to something else. Help bolthole.com make the mouse wheel work better. I just got the lowest end hp-ux workstation. It comes with dual scsi, and it could be considered similarly priced. IDE has always been chinzy. Serial ata would have been a great comprimse. My next work station? Mac.

Third, you're not SGI, and stop making your hardware look like it. Get over it. Frankly, pixar and other grapics outlets aren't in love with you anymore. Let it go. Move on. All the bioinfomatics I talk to are going apple.

Forth, clean up your packages, and MAKE PATCHING WORK RIGHT!!! HP and AIX - stick in a cd, reboot. BSD - painless. MS - automated. Even linux is better. Anyone running a large installation sun shop will tell you; sun patching sucks. Take a clue from bsd, linux or aix or even MS; make your systems easy to set up and administer, and you gain the respect and approval of the geeks who sign off on the tech side of the decision. I've lost trust and trust my solutions to patching much better than live update (at this point).

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?!?

Ok... I got it out of my system. Thank for that.

Re:Disappointed Sun Guy

[T-Ranger]

SATA, by definition, is hot swappable. Perhaps your case doesnt handle it, but its part of the spec.

This may be a compleate non-issue for a "workstation".

Which is kinda like SCSI/SCA. It is also, by definition, hot swappable. Provided your case supports it. Which, for example, the Ultra 1 did not.

On the other hand, it is only a matter of time before PATA drives start becoming very hard to find. One of the theoretical advantages of Sun hardware is that it has very long support. In 5 years time if you call up Sun for a SunApproved (tm) PATA drive for your Blade 1500, one of three things will happen: a) they will get one that has been sitting on the shelf for 5 years from their big, expensive, warehouse; b) they will get one from a custom manufacturing run; or c) they will say you are SOL. Being Sun, c) is unlikely. But the other 2 options will cost you around $500 for a (at that point) $3.50 drive.

Re:Disappointed Sun Guy

[0x0d0a]

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.

Re:Disappointed Sun Guy

[MROD]

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.

Software is real cost and reliability the priority

[Anonymous Coward]

I think many responses to this review have missed the point of this system. This is NOT a machine intended for users running benchmarks that demonstrate how much slower it is compared to a similarly priced x86 machine. These machines are targetted at the EDA/CAD/CAM/visualisation clients that spend much more money on Software Licenses than they do on Hardware.

So, what do you think the priorities of these customers are? Performance? Maybe, but only compared to other machines that offer a similar level of *RELIABILITY*.

This topic of reliability never gets touched in the article, but is probably the most important aspect of this machine.

Ask yourself, if you have 20 2-year software licenses that cost $750,000 total, will you skimp on the reliability of the hardware running that software? The extra cash is paid out to protect that large investment in software.

Are these machines more reliable than comparable (and less expensive) x86 systems? I wouldn't know, and the article makes no mention of this. I'd venture to guess that a company like SUN with a substantial R&D budget produces a better verified and more reliable system than a home built win-x86 system that scores 23000 on 3Dmark2001 (sometimes) and runs circles around that new SUN POS (assuming no crash to desktop or worse).

Companies that sell UNIX systems (IBM, SUN, HP, SGI) see hardware as a vehicle for selling a software stack and services. And if the software isn't their own, then the selling point is the reliability of the underlying hardware system.

To shrug off this system based solely on performance is to ignore the most important aspect of this system and others like it: RELIABILITY.

RTFA

[^BR]

Solaris 9 does not support yet that machine... Will do thi spring.

Experiences with Sun's blade

[lonesometrainer]

Ok, so I thought when J2EE stuff is your everyday work, some Solaris know-how would be nice. Bought a Sun Blade 100.

Well, Solaris was interesting software at least. The Sun Blade was nicely documented and stuff, but it was awfully slow and in fact the cheapest-built hardware I've ever put my hands on. Even those supermarkt-pcs were alot more silent and felt more robust.

And that machine cost ~ $1500 when I bought it. Incredible.

Sun servers were a completely opposite experience for me, built for eternity, great support.

Never, ever again Sun on the desktop.

Ignorant masses at slashdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Every some troll posts an article like this, the slashdot ignorati line up to chat about how fast their wintel/lentel machines are in comparison.

Well your intel box runs exactly 0 binary applications that require this OS and arcitecture. That's a significant loss in MIPS/clockspeed/whatever...they just won't run on your intel box.

If some high end engineer/engineering group has special apps, developed and massaged over decades, that do something that simply must be done and done fast and with a minimum of fuss, $5000 is typically nothing for that person/group.

Demanding a port to wintel/lintel OTOH could be nightmarish--huge cost, all new set of bugs, etc.

Just a word in his favor

[haggar]

While I actually agree with all you've said, I don't think the reviewer completely misses the point of this product. He did mention the purpose for which such a workstation would usually be purchased, and listed some of the more popular CAD and EDA software packages available for it. I myself have recognized all of the EDA tools listed in the review, and let me tell you, the price of the Blade 1500 is peanuts compared to these software packages.

Sun w/o Bill Joy

[ch-chuck]

Isn't that like Atari w/o Noland Bushnell, Apple w/o Steve Jobs, SGI w/o Jim Clark...

yes, that was a troll.

[twitter]

companies ... that buy these boxes are buying them for the OS and rarely for the groundbreaking hardware.

Sun has not made cutting edge hardware? Yeah, there's plenty of legacy stuff that works with Solaris, but Sun hardware has always been superior. Their busses have always kicked ass, which was good because your typically use Sun for big ugly data crunching and need the troughput. Oh yeah, Sun also used nice SCSI for large and fast storage. These dinky blade boxes with PCI and IDE crap don't do the name justice.

It's never a suprised that people on slashdot just don't get Sun equipment.

Would you please enlighten me? I've got no idea why someone would want one of these blades. If you have software that has not been ported over to GNU, you could just use x86 Solaris or purchase a real Sun used.

If Sun's goal is to comoditize thier hardware, they need to ditch the AMD windoze hunchback and embrace free software. They could steal most of the Xenon server market if they did this. Yes, it's very difficult to get data from the cheap XP box to your nice Sun. The answer is to convince people that a GNU box works better than an XP box for any and all work related computing. Then they have their pick of ssh and all the traditional Unix networking software.

Re:yes, that was a troll.

[MrPerfekt]

Sun has not made cutting edge hardware?

Quite frankly in recent years in the workstation market, no, no they haven't. They switched to PCI/IDE years ago for workstations. A majority of the Ultra series was PCI and not S/bus. The current Blades are more powerful than Ultra boxes. Sun is just behind the development curve of x86 (and PowerPC even for that matter) and they don't look to catch up anytime soon. Anyway, I can't really tell if you're defending old Sun hardware and blasting the new or if you're just trying to tear down my statement.

Would you please enlighten me?

Yes, I would.

I've got no idea why someone would want one of these blades. If you have software that has not been ported over to GNU, you could just use x86 Solaris or purchase a real Sun used.

That is a hugely humorous statement. You wouldn't. Companies that have applications that run on Sparc like having workstations of the same architecture for debuging purposes among others. And if you think that all applications _should_ be ported over to a GNU system, you should have your head examined as that's a very closed way of thinking. Many corporations don't see a need to port their (in many cases) proprietary software from something that already works just fine. And the last part of that statement, x86 Solaris is a joke and not compatible with binaries from Sparc Solaris (obviously) which doesn't help at all when debugging and/or using commercial applications. But the kicker, "purchase a real Sun used", um, these are real Sun's.. they even have the magical logo. Did you realize that a used Sun which I'm assuming you're going for an S/Bus Ultra with an UltraSparc IIe is dog slow compared to the UltraSparc III in that Blade. If you're so worried about disk performance, just put a SCSI PCI card and disk in it and shut up.

If Sun's goal is to comoditize thier hardware, they need to ditch the AMD windoze hunchback and embrace free software.

No, they don't need to embrace free software. Closed source, Proprietary, well supported software is just fine when it works well. Just because you can't feel special because you can't ./configure; make; make install with it doesn't make it bad. And how cute... you spelled windows, windoze.

They could steal most of the Xenon server market if they did this.

Huh? By making Solaris open-source they could steal most of the Xenon market? I have no idea what you're talking about.

Yes, it's very difficult to get data from the cheap XP box to your nice Sun.

Oh yeah, FTP, NFS, CDROM even... super hard.

The answer is to convince people that a GNU box works better than an XP box for any and all work related computing. Then they have their pick of ssh and all the traditional Unix networking software.

What? We have to convince people to use Linux instead of Windows XP... Um, this isn't even relevant to what we're talking about.

To sum up, you're pretty mixed on several things. The primary thing I was trying to educate you on in the parent post is that, these boxes are not for you. They're for research, development, and mission-critical applications. You will never have a need for it. Corporations on the other hand do for various reasons.

Ever time somebody brings up Sun, everyone goes "THOSE SPECS SUCK, KILL KILL KILL!". Sun equipment isn't about the specs. It's about the OS mostly and the support you get for that OS to run your extremely important applications. We can debate all day long about how they should've put SCSI in there instead of IDE or what have you but that's not the point of my posts. Sun has made some poor decisions in regards to their hardware but I really don't think that will stop customers (read: companies, not you) that already have Sun equipment from switching. It certainly won't gain them customers, but thats another debate.

Re:yes, that was a troll.

[dedazo]

Don't bother with this guy. He used your post to make yet another offtopic strawman argument about how "M$ sux" and is evil. He doesn't know what he's talking about.

Look at his posting history to get an idea.

Still...

[hey]

Its still pretty cool to have one a real Windows session in a Solaris window. I would like a setup like that for Linux.

Re:Software is real cost and reliability the prior

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

TRANSLATION OF PARENT POST

[Anonymous Coward]

"Since my only previous was with a UNIX-based operating system was running Linux of my Pentium II, I was a bit daunted with the task of installing Solaris 8 on a SPARCserver 5. It took me 6 tries to figure out the installer, since I don't understand Sun disklabels. Once I finished the install, I couldn't figure out what these "csh" and "vi" utilities were, so I started poking around in /proc, but I quickly realized that Solaris's /proc is very different from the /proc on Linux, and I started to cry. I then called someone with more experience who fixed what I had broken and loaded up our custom database server software. In the meantime I went back to my cubicle, curled up with my Gentoo Linux eMachines running MySQL, and cried myself to sleep while sucking my thumb."

Re:TRANSLATION OF PARENT POST

[calc]

Well since my only experience with Sun's was several years ago with Solaris 2.6/7 on Sun Ultra 10's and Netra's I suppose it could be skewed. The systems were about the speed of a Celeron 400 so that probably annoyed me a bit as well. It has been a while since I used them (previous job) but from what I can recall it didn't even come with simple utilities like "top" out of the box. So I had to go download and manually install a bunch of shit off the sunfreeware site. Couldn't even compile things since even gcc wasn't included. I have heard rumors that with Solaris 9 useful utilities are finally included. The only things we used it for were CiscoWorks, OpenView, and Concord eHealth. And no I did not get someone else to do it. I have been using various forms of Unix (AIX/FreeBSD/Linux/Solaris) since 1993. Since Sun's are so overpriced for the computing power they deliver we used Debian Linux x86 boxes for everything else.

BTW - I notice you post as Anonymous while I post under my real user account (notice the id #). Are you scared you might get modded as a troll? :)

Re:Brings value?

[DA-MAN]

The only reason people buy Sun is that there is quite a bit of enterprise software that only runs on Sun or Windows NT.

That quote is funny in so many ways...

Who's buying these things?

[kanly]

I take care of Sun kit at work, and I can't possibly imagine why anybody is buying these. The place where sun sets themselves apart is in their large machines - dozens of CPUs, piles and piles of SCSI channels, etc. If you're buying high-end sun stuff, you should see if you can do better by clustering cheaper boxes, but sometimes you can't, and the big huge behemoths are a reasonable choice.

If you're buying SunBlades, though, you need to visit your psychiatrist and have him help you with your white-box phobia. $5k will get you an Opteron box that will run rings around this thing all day long.

Re:Who's buying these things?

[swordgeek]

Applications.

The machines are application driven, and a lot of applications run FAR better (or in some cases, exclusively) on Solaris/Sparc stuff. If you need to run the apps, you need the workstations.

And make no mistake; a dual processor Blade2500 with a pair of XVR-1200s is a MONSTER workstation for certain apps.

Actually the reviewer is a brand whore

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Actually the reviewer is a brand whore

[TheLink]

Yah. I was wondering why he said Sony. If he had said Plextor, I'd believe him. But Sony??? Heck over here Lite-on CDROM and DVD drives sell at a _premium_ over Sonys.

Plextors are mucho expensive though.

Lite-ons are ok. I wouldn't buy a Sony CD or DVD drive/player - they always seem prone to compatibility problems.

Re:Actually the reviewer is a brand whore

[mikis]

Worse than that: Sony optical drives ARE rebranded Lite-Ons. You can flash your Sony DVD with Lite-On firmware and it will still work, some say even better than with Sony firmware.

Samsung RAM, not as good as Crucial? Umm, never saw a Crucial stick, but I bet they don't make their memory chips, probably use ones made by Samsung, Infineon, Hynix or some other not-so-cool-sounding company.

So, yes, he is a brand whore ;)

Re:Actually the reviewer is a brand whore

[mikis]

Crucial uses Infineon I believe. Infineon is Micron related somehow right? Well anyhow Crucial is a division of Micron.

No, Infineon is/was Siemens. Last I heard they were selling much of their share.

Re:Brings value?

[AKAImBatman]

x86 Solaris, anyone?

Despite a best effort from Sun, x86 Solaris sucks (in comparison to Sparc Solaris) and will always suck. The reason is not because Sun is incompetent, but rather because Sparc hardware is so awesome. Solaris is designed to work with the OpenPROM, high-end hardware Sparc platform at a level that PCs can never even hope to touch.

PCs are still stuck with BIOSes and pathetic 8x8 text modes. Sparcs boot up into an interactive graphics mode with pretty looking terminal fonts. The only difference between text-mode and X-Windows are the graphics being drawn. (As anyone who's seen the console output print over top of X-Windows can attest.) Not to mention that a system can be rescued or installed from remote locations thanks to the beauty of OpenPROM/OpenBoot.

Face it, Sparcs win on the "total package" level. PCs win on the "play around as a hobby" level.

Price is what you will pay....

[op00to]

Anyone who pays full price for any Sun gear is getting ripped off! The price on these boxes are always negotiable. You'd be surprised how cost competitive Sun solutions can be when you start talking business with the sales guy.

Needless to say, being a huge public university helps too.

I just installed 3 workstations

[Sporkinum]

I just installed 3 Blade1500 workstations. We run a legacy medical PACS system that is based on Sun boxes. We are running anywhere from Sparc 4s to the Sunblade range. We are currently using the Blades to drive 4 three megapixel x 10 bit Dome monitors. They work great in that application, and that is what our software runs on. The vendor that we have our PACS system with is moving to a PC/Linux platform, but for the legacy software we run now, the Blades offer a lot of bang for the buck.

BTW, the build quality of the machines is to the usual high Sun standard. I like the looks of them as well.

Utterly ironic that...

[Genghis9]

...the SunPCI card will probably burn the main machine on equivalent benchmarks under Linux (once it's running on this machine)

Sparc IV's and V's ??

[Billly Gates]

Sun and TI better get their dam act together.

I sense another Motorolla going on here. TI see's only short term costs to upgrade their chip fabrication plants and is screwing Sun. Meanwhile they are losing sparc sales because fustrated customers are switching to lintel and AIX.

Perhaps sun is testing waters and will likely dump TI if the Sparc IV's and V's which both were supposed to be out by now, are not out soon.

Perhaps they will use AMD64's for all their systems.

Sun could use the processor but custom build their high end back planed motherboards and multiple buses known for their servers.

HP is doing this for their superdome with Itaniums.

I would be royally pissed if I were Scott McNealy right now. Customers will not upgrade unless newer systems perform significantly better.

If sales do not go up, McNeally could lose his job. Merryl Lynch already tried to can him last quarter.

Article is meaningless

[caesar79]

This guy has no idea what he is talking about.

First things first - sun does not compete on speed. It competes on reliability and stability. Yeah my athlon 1800+ is way faster than my sun blade 100...but if you check the number of reboots, sun wins hands down with 0 in over 2 years.

Incidentally, I get more work done on the sun m/c.

Now to the article:
"...The 350w power supply is made by Samsung, and I would consider it barely adequate for this kind of computer....If I were designing this workstation I would have used a more robust power supply..."

Yeah sure. If you could you'd put in a nuclear reactor over there!!! Ever heard of power efficiency? Those guys had a good enough reason to stick with a 350W power supply...and trust me, those engineers are no idiots.

"...I wish it had a drive activity indicator LED and a reset button, which would add a lot of convenience for very little added cost..."

Reset button ? Sun ? get off your windowz box and work on a sun box for a year. Tell me if you *ever* need to reboot it. (for those who dont know - very few patches require reboots)

"... You're also subject to automatic software updates which may include further license restrictions. But at least there's no product activation, so it's not as bad as it could be...."

automatic s/w updates ? Solaris 8 ?

The "reviewer" is totally unqualified. He has no idea of the intended use of Sun machines. Nor does it seem he has ever worked on one. Comparing it with 32bit desktops is like comparing a car with a humvee.. Sure the former beats it in speed [hummer goes max ~80mph)..but in real life, especially when you are being bombarded ...humvee is the way to go.

Re:Article is meaningless

[weicco]

In my SparcStation 5 I just press STOP+A and type boot, I don't need a fricking reset button for that :)

Re:Article is meaningless

[seppy]

Just had to take exception to the very few patches require reboots.

Kernel upgrades require reboots and happen frequently.

Set up the SUN's auto patching mechanism and watch the number of patches pile up that require reboots.

The blade series is a crappy line of 64bit PC's which is intended to be used as any PC is. All of my coworkers have Blades, and they suck, my Compaq AP550 Workstation with a PIII 700 is better than their Blades. I don't think he misunderstood at all.

Now their high end hardware is very nice, and SunVTS is invaluable, as is OBDiag, and OpenBoot.

Re:Article is meaningless

[swordgeek]

Kernel upgrades happen frequently? You must have a different attitude towards patching than most shops I know.

Here, patches are applied when (a) a problem occurs that's addressed by a patch, or (b) a patch addresses a potential crucial bug on our systems.

Many of our production servers are running Solaris8 kernel patch -18, because they're stable and secure. No need to patch the E4500 to fix the latest Sunfire memory issue.

I would ask what your coworkers are using their blades for. They're not intended as a replacement for a PC. They're not a good replacement for a PC. They are however, good workstations.

Amusing about the Sun PCI card

[Stonent1]

It actually has equal or probably greater performance than the system itself. As long as the CPU is not soldered, it definitely WILL if you upgrade it.

Re: weak troll

[benzapp]

Out of the fortune 500, who needs a 64 or 112 processor system? Nobody.

This seriously has to be the stupidest post I have seen in a long time. Who do you think DOES need that kind of equipment? Just Industrial Light and Magic? Universities?

Fortune 500 companies have tens of thousands of employees and have custom designed statistical software processing data on every conceivable aspect of business.

Modern financial corporations are BUILT upon statistics. Investment firms will be analyzing millions of financial transactions all over the world every single day. Insurance companies also have very complex risk analysis tools with huge data sets.

Those are just two examples. The other fortune 500 companies are going to be companies like GM. Do you honestly think that a company like GM does not use the most sophisticated simulation software imaginable? They have been using

What do you think the entire IT industry is about? just simplifying data entry? The real benefit is the analysis of the data which aids in management decisions.

Re: weak troll

[Billly Gates]

Which again is only 500. Out of 500 they upgrade such massive machines only 5 years to cut down on costs.

1,200 units a year is not enough to keep sun afloat.

The mid end department server is where the market is at.

Look at the trends. Central mainframe like environments are dieing and being replaced with commidity distributed clusters or nodes.

For fiancial processing a few smp racks can more then adaquitly supply the job for a fraction of the price. smp pc's can do the job of these complex systems just a decade ago.

Simulations do not run on 112 cpu systems.

They run on a few 4-way smp systems.

Only datawharehousing needs such beasts today.

Re:Brings value?

[shokk]

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.

Sun Blade Clarification

[arrianus]

One thing to bear in mind is that this is a Blade.

The Blade is Sun's low-end series of machines. They are not fast. They are not reliable. I've seen a fair number of the SunBlade 100s overheat and die. I've had one Blade die over and over and over again. They have low-grade IDE hard drives, and the rest of the system is of comparable quality. There isn't any Sun magic in there to prevent the industry-standard low-end IDE drive or low-end PSU from failing, and the Sun components of the system are of comparable quality (in some cases, of comparable quality to an eMachine). Anyone who tells you otherwise is either clueless or trying to sell you something.

A high-end x86 machine will blow away these Blades on almost every benchmark, and cost a lot less. This model Sparc has higher IPC than an x86, but not 3x higher, and more than 3x lower MHz.

The reliability advantages of the Sun's come on higher-end machines. The throughput advantages come on higher-end machines. All of the standard advantages people have cited in this forum come from higher-end machines. Someone mentioned large databases -- the Blade 1500 only supports 4GB of RAM, and beyond that you're swapping to IDE. No performance boost there.

These machines are engineered for cost -- not speed, not reliability, not network throughput, not memory bandwidth, not upgradeability, and not anything else. We've bought Blades for just under a grand. When you consider how much more it costs to have your own custom-made CPU, motherboard, chipset, case, etc, without the advantages of mass-production, that's very, very cheap.

However, sometimes you need a Sun. Over here, we have some very high-end Suns (64 CPU machines, etc.). We have a lot of custom software that only runs on Suns. A lot of mainstream engineering applications do not have GNU/Linux ports, and we really don't want to be touching Windows. Having the network standardized to the same type of machine, and having everyone standardized to the same software helps a lot. This is one place where the low-end Suns fit in. You don't buy them because they are faster or better than an x86. You buy them because the high-end suns are faster and better than an x86, and it's often convenient to have matching low-end machines on your network.

First word of page is not a good sign...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Leveraging" just reeks of Marketspeak (tm). "Building on the core technologies," maybe, or "Working with the existing core technologies." But "leveraging" brings to mind synergizing with the creatives and helping push On-demand opportunities to potential market base. I'll just task you with a few actionables, and hopefully we'll come out of the opt-out with a win-win! ON-DEMAND!

Article summary for those too lazy to read it

[oingoboingo]

Sun sent me a Blade 1500 to review. It's real ugly, and doesn't have much space for expansion. Apart from that it's just a PC. With an UltraSPARC IIIi CPU in it mind you, but with a $75 consumer grade Seagate IDE hard drive and a DVD drive from a 3rd tier supplier. Your mother's Dell has higher specced components in it.

It runs kind of OK I guess, about as fast as a 1.8GHz Pentium 4, which for comparison no-one would consider buying for a new PC these days. The Blade 1500 is faster than the Blade 150, but then again so is my Palm PDA. If your vendor still hasn't ported your application to Linux, then this workstation might make some sense while you wait for them to do it. If you're not a Sun shop, this won't interest you. If you *are* a Sun shop, then this will be an adequate last Sun workstation for you before you head off into the x86/Linux arena in 2005/2006.

Take a loving look at your SparcStation 20 you've got stashed away in the basement...they don't make them like they used to.

Re:Article summary for those too lazy to read it

[fbsderr0r]

stashed away ? mines in the rack running as a firewall/NAT box. on the other hand, the sparcstation 2 is stashed away. other then power outages, its been running for 2 years without a problem.

reset button

[morcheeba]

I developed drivers for a sun ultra... it was pretty messy stuff with untested hardware, high speed dma transfers, and hard real-time requirements. Just about as ugly of a driver as you'd want to do. And, as much abuse as that machine got, I never needed a reset button -- it would usually just dump core and reset itself. I was really impressed with the OS.

Re:Brings value?

[RevRa]

No kidding. A "review" written by a person who has no clue about the hardware or software he's reviewing.

He tried to install Gentoo and *bsd on it. If I were reviewing a Chevy and wanted to put a Honda engine in it for my review, then bitched because it wouldn't work, wouldn't I look like some sort of moron?

Solaris is an excellent operating system in terms of stability, reliability, and professional support, but you'll find it quite difficult to set up and maintain it on your own and it can be difficult to find much software for it.

What the hell is that supposed to mean? I can find a ton of software for Solaris, and I personally find it easy as pie to set up. (Of course I've been working with Solaris for about 8 years now.) Installing GIMP? WTF?

Solaris is not anything like GNU/Linux or even the *BSDs

Yea no kidding pal, thanks for the big revelation. Solaris/SunOS has been around longer and they aren't the same operating system.

there is no large, friendly, easily accessible community like there is for the Free Unix projects.

Have you lost your freakin' mind? How about sunfreeware.com? comp.os.solaris? #solaris on ANY of the IRC networks? Not to mention the fact that a great many of the people who hang out in the "free unix projects" community are also Solaris nerds.

Solaris in its current form can never be Free Software or even open-source because of all of the proprietary code that it contains.

No shit Dick Tracy. This just makes me want to smack him. Is this a review of Sun's Solaris license? Or is this supposed to be a rewview of a piece of hardware?

you can't use Solaris 8 in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of a nuclear facility (so if you can't use a top-tier OS like Solaris, what DO nuclear designers, engineers and sysadmins use to run their computers? Windows 95?).

Really? Interesting that GE Power Systems uses it. (They design nuclear stuff all the time.) NASA uses it to launch rockets, and hey, Java is helping run the Mars rover Spirit.

What this clause means is that a nuclear power facility is supposed to go through special channels to get software and operating systems certified for use in their facility. The version of Solaris you have is not certified for such use. (Yes, there are different versions for different applications.)

Measuring performance was a very difficult task because of the amount of reading, research, and configuration that had to go into Solaris 8 to get it to compile benchmark programs.

Which should be read as, "I didn't know what the hell I was doing and have no idea how to review a piece of hardware so I didn't really do anything other than try to customize my desktop and then install Linux and *bsd on it."

This is no desktop system. It may look like one, it may in some ways act like one, but make no mistake: this is a workhorse, not a pony or a racehorse.

Well, you're partly right. When you compare it with like systems, it keeps perfect pace with the pack and I'm sure outperforms many of them. But it is a workhorse. Not to be compared with Apples and Intel systems. Sun hardware and the Solaris OS are not designed to be pretty, they're designed to be bulletproof. They might not get you there the fastest, and they may not be pretty, but you'll get where you need to go quickly, efficiently, and SAFELY.

I think he should have just typed, "Well, it isn't my Linux desktop, so, you know, it sucks."

Strange though.

[moogla]

The only problem I ever seem to have with Dells are their power supplies (and how adding any extra disks past configured capacity always seems to end up in a power supply dying).

I wish they would overspec them. Sure, they may not be as quiet, but jeez!

-1 Pedantic

[kotj.mf]

Purely symantics...

Irony's a bitch, innit?

Re:-1 Pedantic

[Paleomacus]

Speaking of irony. When I logged on Slashdot this morning my fortune was;

FOOLED you! Absorb EGO SHATTERING impulse rays, polyester poltroon!!

Re:-1 Pedantic

[Kent Recal]

HAHA!
Exactly what I thought when I read his post! :-)

Hah. You're kidding me, right?

[moogla]

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?

And the sad truth is...

[moogla]

that uber-gaming boxes have largely surpassed the requirements of many workstations (with the exception of RAM requirements).

I mean, did you think the ATI Fire XL was anything but an R350 with 4 times the ram, thereby justifying it costing twice as much?

I didn't think so.

The problem:

[moogla]

Lots of software that typically Sun used to push on their platforms (over PCs that were much slower/less reliable in the past) is not as aggresively multithreaded as it should be. It didn't matter back then, and it matters now, but that would necessitate rewriting a lot of algorithmic code.

I'm sure the difference in speed would be much more even or in Suns' favor if the IC software could properly utilize the 8-way machine.
(Have you considered running multiple jobs in parallel on the Sun an compiling throughput stats?)

It's stuff like Oracle that really shine on Sun boxes. But the stuff that tends to run on Solaris really good also tends to still run on PCs really good, because that's easy to do.

Re:The problem:

[TheLink]

The problem is Sun SPARC processors have fallen way behind almost everyone else, heck they're slower than Fujitsu's SPARC (primepower). Go look at the SPEC figures.

Go as multithreaded as you want, the x86 will still beat SPARCs - if you can easily parallelize a task, you can use many cheap x86 servers instead. If you can't parallelize, then you'd use a very fast x86 server or Itanium if it's a particular sort of floating point performance you need, or some other CPU- IBM Power, or Fujitsu primepower.

There were only two things the mass market x86 servers don't have: 64 bit and very high availability. Sun has the 1st one, and isn't really famous for the second.

With Opteron the x86 camp now have 64 bit.

Very high availability = swap out CPU and still run etc. But you might be able to get close to that if you have enough x86 servers and run clustering/virtualization software.

I suspect you can get Oracle to really shine on x86 too, given the same amount of money or even half.

Re:Software is real cost and reliability the prior

[akuma(x86)]

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.

Re:AMD Opteron

[Xabraxas]

People keep going on about their wonderful support but the fact is that these days you can get the very same thing from the likes of Dell. And that includes a direct line to highly qualified engineers who are intimately acquainted with your particular situation and are ready to send a tech or replacement hardware to your location 24 hours a day.

That has got to be a joke. Dell support is awful, and you certainly don't deal with high quality engineers. Most of them don't know their foot from their ass. It's a hassle just for them to admit that their hardware failed, nevermind ship you a new unit. I might as well be dealing with AOL support.

heh

[rebelcool]

i don't know why i'm replying to this post, but if you're really curious I used this nick long before that silly movie came out, much less slashdot arriving in the world.

And i believe it was something along the lines of "zero cool" in the movie wasn't it? I saw it once many a year ago...

Re:heh

[DavittJPotter]

Ack, you're right! It was "Zero Cool", now that you've struck my memory bell. :) No real insult intended, I just found it funny (obviously). Sorry if you took it to heart.

What he said

[rs79]

I bought an E350 for $300 off ebay, realized I had $$$ left over and bought an E4500 for $1500 again from ebay. A handfull of 64 bit processors, gobs of ram and buckets of RAID SCSI storage. That sure made out net conneciton the choke point instantly.

They're amazingly impressive boxen, expecially for the money.

I realize this has nothing to do with the blade, but, not so old used Sun hardware is a fooking amazing bargin.

I just wish thet had flashy blinky lights and bit-switches like an old 360. Big iron should in my book. :-)

The most expensive thing about these boxes is the electricity, it's about 12X what a PC uses. (Around here a PC costs about $9/mo to power)

For a Postgressql server I'm not sure you can beat this price/performance.

well

[rebelcool]

I can't speak for everyone here, but I'd have to say a good ole university education and degree in computer science helps quite alot if you're in a good program that exposes you to different architectures, different ideas and intelligent professors who can guide you through the pitfalls and real world examples and point out misconceptions. And of course, actually learning how a computer works beyond the source, both electrically and theoretically helps avoid silly guffaws that you read here that get modded up.. like someone suggesting solid state harddrives that use SCSI (if you know your bus specs and you know how fast solid state ram works, you know why SCSI isn't an ideal choice - yes I know there are fast flavors of SCSI, but you still would want something not based around mechanical drive device access)

at the very least it will hopefully mitigate that terrible "I don't understand what this article is about so I will criticize it blindly" attitude that pervades slashdot. Though I don't think you need a good CS education to see that's not exactly a good approach to new ideas in the world.

I'm getting off on a rant here but I guess what annoys me the most about slashdot is the cynical close minded attitude toward everything - even new technology, which just seems oxymoronic to me. And its almost always based in sheer ignorance.

Re:Brings value?

[tanveer1979]

I am writing this post from a Sun Machine. A Sun Ultra 10 to be precise. Which was last powered down 4 months ago. And this machine has been running endlessly, with average reboot gap of around 8 months, for the past 6 years. The only thing that has ever failed is one of the RAMS which went bad and this led to shutting down the machine for around 15 minutes.

Do you expect this sort of reliability from Dell? Your applications may be more suited for linux now, but there are still tasks which we run in VLSI design. Which require a lot of CPU cache. The MHz is not really important. All that matters is the consistant 100% CPU utilization for 6 months on a 4 CPU 750MHz machine and not a single powerdown, and no faliures. Try running a Pentium or Athalon 6 months flat out.

Comparing Sun to an Intel is like apples to oranges. Both are for a different purpose

Did the author not RTFPR?

[grahamlee]

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.

The SunPCI III is, I think, the primary selling point of the Blade 1500 -- it's what separates this workstation from the proprietary competition by essentially combining an UltraSPARC and an IA32 machine into one unit with full binary compatibility for both architectures.

Following on from...

The proprietary 64-bit workstation market is dominated by Sun Microsystems

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.

Pizza

[er]

Sun needs to make another pizza box, I miss those.

It's really amazing how companies still have sparcstation laying around. You can't say that about 486s.

Re:Pizza

[BenjyD]

That's only because the sparcstations are physically indestructible. They're like the cockroaches of the computer world.

Re:Strange though

[kamisalami]

At my company, we buy Dell and Dell only. They run fine, except laptops a year ago sometimes needed to have some screws tightent, but other than that, they run like a charm. Service is great also. I have no financial interests in Dell, we just use them. If i would buy a brand computer for home use, it would be a Dell with 3 year NBD on site guarantee (wich is standard).

Re: weak troll

[0x0d0a]

I don't understand why you'd need 112 CPUs to do data warehousing. As a matter of fact, I would imagine that data warehousing would be decidedly an I/O bound task.

IO IO - off to work we go

[dbIII]

The great selling point of a Sun is that it seemes to maintain a "cool" factor much like Apple computers

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't sparc based machines still very good with IO, so get used by people who need to move a lot of data around - or work large amounts of data in memory?

Re:IO IO - off to work we go

[jimicus]

Not when the "high powered workstation" has a fairly run of the mill IDE disk fitted.

Re:IO IO - off to work we go

[BoomerSooner]

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.

Re:FYI

[bhtooefr]

I am defining the contents of the variable SCO as the text litigious bastards.

GDB now supports fork() following!

[0x0d0a]

Just dropped by the GDB website, and took a gander. Apparently GDB 6.0 is out. Its changelog has this fascinating little gem:

* GNU/Linux support for fork, vfork, and exec.

The "catch fork", "catch exec", "catch vfork", and "set follow-fork-mode"
commands are now implemented for GNU/Linux. They require a 2.5.x or later
kernel.

There are some other biggies, like Objective C support. This is definitely something to check out -- I'm hoping that RH will be including it in Fedora Core 2.

So break out that 2.6.1 kernel and get fork-following!

Re:GDB now supports fork() following!

[jaavaaguru]

Thanks for that... I've not had a look at the GDB site recently as I've been using DBX more. I'll go and check it out now :-)

Re:GDB now supports fork() following!

[0x0d0a]

Note that, IIRC, GDB already had HP-UX support fork()-following support, but I haven't seen anything about Solaris, AIX, or BSD support.

Re:GDB now supports fork() following!

[jaavaaguru]

I've been using GDB 6.0 on Linux for almost a week now, and am quite impressed with it. I might give it a go on Solaris when I get some spare time (still using DBX there).

Do you know if any of the Linux GUI debugger applications (that use GDB in the background) support following forks (particularly the parent AND child option that Sun Workshop has)?

Re:GDB now supports fork() following!

[0x0d0a]

Unless GDB 6 has a "both" follow-fork mode, I'd suspect not WRT parent *and* child.

DDD, at least, can apparently handle following child, from my skimming people talking about it. I swore off GUI debuggers, so not too sure.

Re:GDB now supports fork() following!

[jaavaaguru]

DDD does let you follow child. It's done this for a while now on Solaris with DBX, and has a nicer UI than Sun Workshop (AFAIC - as far as I'm concerned). I don't often wish to follow both parent and child, and wasn't aware of DBX allowing you to do that either (perhaps just because I've not looked closely enough), although Workshop (the GUI) does give this option.

Let not be stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

"Also, I don't have a lot of respect for someone who claims that WD hard drives are of better quality than Seagate drives. As someone who has killed every WD drive I've ever seen in a real workstation environment, I'll take a Seagate any day, even if it is IDE."

Ever since hard drives were sold for PC's, people have claimed one brand is more reliable than another.

That's not true. For years, people have derided Seagate as "Seacrates", but really, different lines of HD's have different levels of reliability (i.e. the first Barracudes had a 100% failure rate within 2 years), but that is meaningless across an entire product line, and people who avoid entire manufacturers of HD's are simply using anecdotal information as if it were a statistical fact.

Stop it. Be a computer *scientist*.

Re:Hmmm....

[christophersaul]

Sorry, but that's nonsense! There are numerous apps available, actively developed, with Solaris as their prime platform, for good reasons. Stability, predictability and support, amongst many others.

Re:FYI

[TheRaven64]

I don't know what language you are using, but in C, and all C-like languages, = is the assignment operator, and == is the comparison operator. Your sig is testing whether the two things are equal, not assigning one to the other.

It's only a PC

[nicolas.e]

Well, it is only a PC with normal, not high-end components, appart from the GPU. And the ultrasparcs are slow (I'm only paraphrasing..)

Still, it's pretty and it is "cool" to have a sun rather than anything more ordinary.

BTW the keyboard I have on the ultra10 I use at work looks exactly like the one pictured, and I don't find it painful.

And it's expensive.

However, if I was given a computer, I would rather have the sun than a similarly-priced pc, despite its disadvantages.

no more money given to the wintel world

[laorban]

For my part, this computer is one good way to escape my current corporate wintel prison. Some fresh and good enough hardware in the landscape is always a good thing. I do have some concerns however, Solaris8 and those crappy keyboard/mouses available from Sun.

Re:Brings value?

[nicolas.e]

Sun hardware and the Solaris OS are not designed to be pretty

I find both Solaris (more precisely gnome) and the hardware pretty.

Re:Brings value?

[Zeinfeld]

The only thing that has ever failed is one of the RAMS which went bad and this led to shutting down the machine for around 15 minutes. Do you expect this sort of reliability from Dell?

Who said anything about Dell? I have run machine rooms with hundreds to thousands of machines. I simply could not put up with the level of reliability you describe.

Low end Intel boxes do have reliability issues, but the issue is not the chip, its the crappy construction, crappy power supplies and the rest. Sun do better than the lowest of the low but they do not do great. IBM do a vastly better job.

Sun got where it is today by being the cheap UNIX vendor, not the high qulity vendor. They priced at 20% less than DEC with a MTF of months rather than years.

Re:FYI

[bhtooefr]

Fixed it. Haven't taken any classes on C++ yet...

Re:Next service pack is 2.

[odyrithm]

Just thought you should know, maybe the monkeys already knew SP2 was in the works, so went straight to SP3, so you don't look like and asshole.

Re:Brings value?

[TheLink]

Uh. Any decent beige box clone can easily do 8 months without reboots, given the right O/S (FreeBSD seems decent enough).

Dell _servers_ (not desktops, and forget notebooks) can do better - 1-3 years (power supply or fan fails).

Why should I pay a premium for a Sun if it can only be about as good as that?

If I really needed HA, then perhaps I should pay a premium for HP (VMS or Tandem) or an IBM mainframe. Do Suns have uptimes measured in decades? e.g. 11 years, 17 years etc.

Re:Brings value?

[matfud]

You do realise that the graphics board in the Sun
cost somewhere in the region of $2500-$3000 dot you? And that the sun comes with a built in AMD 1.4Ghz computer (with its own 512Meg of ram and its own graphics board)

SUN RELIABLE ????

[wtarreau]

I'm wondering if you have used Sun in production environment to say that they are reliable ! It's the crappiest hardware I have ever seen. I don't even speak about U10, those which you need to buy 6 to get 5 nearly working, but even up to E420, you can get several failures a year per machine, sometimes RAM, sometimes CPU cache, sometimes the onboard NIC. All I would agree is that I haven't seen many disk failures yet (but they don't build them). Nowadays, they are build with the same base components as PCs, but are probably much less tested, and design flaws tend to last longer.

Oh, and I forgot the support : "Hello, my RAM is dead, the system hanged on production twice today, and the machine asks me to replace U202". Reply : "first, please ensure that you're up to date with OS patches" ! Fuck you! How do I install patches on a non-booting system ? This is non-sense.

Definitely not what I would recommend anywhere.

Workstation for thinkers

[Doc Ruby]

If you actually read the article, you'll see that the Blade 1500 reviewed there is vastly superior to PCs like the Dells and HPs tossed out by posters to this thread. And the model that compares to the P4 mentioned in the Slashdot story blurb is the old model 150, which the 1500 replaces.

Then there's the SunPCI card, which offers an AMD running WinXP (or other OS, like Linux) on a complete x86 PC on a card, on the fast PCI bus. With Solaris 8 support for its GUI, you run WinXP on a completely integrated HW, with the WinXP desktop in an integrated window on your Solaris desktop. Filesystems, clipboard, and other IPC are all integrated. So the Blade 1500 costs more than a Wintel PC: it includes a Wintel PC!

Then there's the issue of "the right tool for the right job". Anyone who's ever used a Sun workstation knows they're more reliable, tougher, and crunch numbers faster than a Wintel PC. So if you're looking for a cheap piece of crap, because all you do is post to Slashdot, download MP3s and play Half-life, spending all your milk money on a Blade 1500 is stupid. But if you want to do all that, and play with the big kids, consider a Blade 1500 on its merits. Read the article, and the actual specs, and maybe even try one. Do what you must to think for yourself. Then you'll deserve serious mind tools like the Blade 1500.

There are other advantages to Sun/Solaris

[Eula]

... than the stability and scaling already mentioned. The NFS implementation is still superior to that of Linux, particularly in areas of caching (works out of the box) and throughput on busy networks - although it's certainly true that the Linux implementation is improving.

Re:AMD Opteron

[Xabraxas]

No I am not talking about consumer level converage.

OFFS

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh for fuck's sake not the "RISC vs. CISC" crapola yet again.

There have been thousands and thousands of posts here to debunk this obsolete myth. But apparently not enough for the diehards.

Mainstream x86 processors have been hybrids (sorta CISC outside, kinda RISC inside) for years. And "pure RISC" is more an academic ideal than reality.

And what is this cycle that is not a clock cycle? Mmm? [Perhaps "more instructions per given task" was intended, to compare to "more clock cycles per given instruction"; this is how the usual zealot comparison of "RISC" vs. some x86 implementation of younder goes, anyway.]

Explaining the fallacy in the "bandwidth for more fetch operations" argument is left as an exercise for other readers. (Clue: your CPU arch hardly dictates how much input your op takes. How come you fetch more data in a RISC -- or any other -- environment?)

And the "C" stands for "Computing", not "Computer".

What is interesting is who was the dingbat that modded this junk "Insightful"...

What retards.

[NateTech]

Sun releases a new platform that won't even run their flagship OS (Solaris 9). Yet another indication that Sun is floundering and doesn't know what they're doing anymore, is the impression this gives me. Wow.

If anyone were actually driving the technology "somewhere" at Sun, would they really let hardware get out the door that can't even run their main OS? This is "back room lab" quality hardware that made it out of the company labs with a Sun badge on it and a manual, but it's not ready for prime-time yet. No company that has a clear technology vision and proper oversight of what's shipping as product would do this.

Sun's still in their tailspin. I use and enjoy their older hardware that came from a day when the company had a vision to provide the best Unix platforms on the planet. (I said they had a vision, I didn't say if they hit it perfectly...) But more and more it looks like they're just lost and floundering and riding on their old systems and sales of mid-range boxes that are hideously overpriced.

works for me

[SHEENmaster]

I have an SS5 that has been running since late June without a single reboot. I use an E3500 as a workstation, via one Linux client or another.

Rather than get the latest fancy 1-way workstation, go the route I did and get a used 8-way server. I saved a LOT of money and got one bitchin-fast system out of it. 2.4ghz clockspeed sum and 32M l2 cache sum, with 4G/ram, for only $1600. Unless of course you're doing video work; a video board costs several thousand.

If you really want powerful computing, just start a chainmail worm with a distributed computing "feature".

No, secondvertigo is an Apple elitist asshole.

[moogla]

I strongly believe he wasn't thinking that far ahead.

It's funny, if you're only thinking about Microsoft's software being coded by monkeys.

If I said something about the next feline incantation of OSX, and how it was written by fairies who wouldn't part with it without gold trinkets, but I was off a version number, I'd be ridiculed similarly I'm sure.

Re:Brings value?

[Miguelito]

Not of course that that makes much difference to anything, as there are very few applications that require 64bit addressing as yet.

Depends on the type of people you're supporting. I support chip designers, and the needs for 64bit addressing is growing at an almost exponential rate. This is one of the reasons that Suns have been our main platform for a long time (that and until the last year or so the software only existed on Solaris, and sometimes HP-UX). Now we have users going gaga over Itaniums, because they've got the 64bitness and are much faster then SPARC boxes (but the cost is just as bad) and the software has finally come out for IA64/linux.

Me? I'm looking for Opterons to really take off. I know we're already fighting to get the apps ported to linux on opterons, and the opterons are much cheaper. I have a feeling we'll end up with a mix of x86_64 and IA64 in the end though.. some things will likely run faster on one platform while others on the other. One thing I really love about opterons is that we can run them in 32bit mode now, where they tend to beat Xeons (2Ghz opterons tend to kick the 3.2GHz Xeon's butts) and when we're ready, we can just update to 64bit versions of linux and we've increased the usability of the box. Using Xeons now would require buying new itaniums to go 64bit. There's also the nice little boost under 64bit on opteron where 32bit apps can malloc up to about 3.5Gig of RAM without kernel patches.

Re:Brings value?

[cehardin]

How the heck is this a troll!?

SunBlade vs Dell CAD benchmark

[Luminary Crush]

I work for a very large aerospace company and put the SunBlade 1500 (with the XVR500 graphics) through it's paces last fall, and compared this machine to a Dell 650/dual 2.8Ghz Quadra 1000, Dell 530 dual 2.4Ghz Quadra 900, and a Dell 270 3.2Ghz Quadra 1000(all running W2K, the company standard engineering image).

The tests were with three different datasets using Pro/Engineer in a repitition of activating these assemblies and performing various operations on them. The results were not shocking, but the SunBlade performed much better than many of you predict, or that the raw Spec numbers might suggest.

The SunBlade performed better than the Dell 530 and slower than the Dell 650. The Dell 270 was the fastest machine, suggesting that the benchmarks were slanted towards raw CPU/integer performance.

However, the Windows machines could not perform the third assembly benchmark because the data sets were too large. Pro/Engineer would randomly CTD when the memory footprint got above 1.5G and never made it to 1.8G. The limit per process on a W2K machine is supposedly 2G (anyone, anyone?), so this is not surprising.

In fact, the W2K machines were not what I would consider stable - crashing far too often and unpredictably throughout the benchmarks. Since they have been issued to some former Sun CAD jockeys there have been a host of complaints about them (though they do like the speed).

Our final conclusions: the Dell machines and W2K were usable for smaller parts, but larger assemblies would be modelled on Sun machines.

The real asset here was Solaris, not so much the hardware itself. If the full suite of Pro/Engineer was available on any x86 box running UNIX we'd be looking very strongly at that combination.

On a side note as to how stable and solid the Solaris virtual memory system is, several years ago I ran a CAD package on a Sun box stripped down to 16M of RAM (but with gobs of swap space) and booted Solaris, launched this memory-hungry CAD app, and created a solid parametric model. The software stated that it required a minimum of 64M to run and recommended 128M, and Solaris itself stated a requirement of 16M for itself alone (at that time). Yet it ran fine (though you can imagine how slow), allowed me to shade the 3D objects, and save the parts before exitting. I'm not sure how many OSes could manage that - certainly not Windows.

Re: "requires to fork"

[jaavaaguru]

A lot of people in the UK would interpret "requires forking" as "requires to be forked", like "that wall needs painting" means "that wall requires to be painted". Saying "requires to fork" is less ambiguous.