Slashdot Mirror
Sun's new UltraSPARC workstation: the Blade 1500
Roman Hauptmann writes "Here's a review of Sun's newest single-CPU workstation based on the UltraSPARC IIIi processor. According to the review, the system barely performs on the level of a P4 1.8ghz machine yet it sells for several times the price. Despite that, the Blade series still brings value to those who do visualization and imaging."
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.
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
CPanel + Root from $35/mo - 10% off with discount code SLASHDOT
> 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`.
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.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
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.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
I disagree; I would say Solaris is the biggest reason why Sun have loyal customers.
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
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
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.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
- 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.
- The entire section on Licencing is just meaningless crap.
The conclusion gets it spot on::wq ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
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"
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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."
- Kate
"DNA is life. The rest is just translation."
We were going to spend $15K about 3 years ago to upgrade an ailing E450 to max out proc and memory. We were supporting multiuser MATLAB/Simulink .
Instead, we threw that money at 6 dual Athlon XPs.
In 3 months, the E450 was only being used to run distributed.net. If a single box was given 2 jobs, it could complete them 225% faster than the Sun, and in the worse case, 150% faster in a contrived memory constrained situation.
Multiply by 6 and we easily more than tripled the capacity, while reducing overhead costs/maintenance.
Sigh. Sun was pissed at us too. We did this a number of times. PC hardware (if you make good choices) has caught up. What are you going to do?
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
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:
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?