The Return of the Sun Workstation, With AMD's Help

Hack Jandy writes "Would you be surprised to hear Sun is the lowest cost Tier 1 dual-Opteron provider? AnandTech benchmarks Sun's newest w2100z and includes some sneak peaks at Solaris 10 and Java Desktop System 2. The biggest surprise at the end - it costs less than IBM and HP's configurations. Has Sun learned from the demise of SGI workstations that relying on one processor architecture is harmful?" CrzyP adds "They perform various benchmarks including 2D/3D rendering, compiling, encryption, and thermal and noise performance, and compare the 64-bit Sun box with various other configurations, including varying operating systems."

Comments

some info about Java Desktop

[hsmith]

Since the article doesn't link it

http://wwws.sun.com/software/javadesktopsystem/

Re:some info about Java Desktop

[Short Circuit]

And a pre-emptive strike against FUD: No, it doesn't run on the Java VM.

Re:some info about Java Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could just link to the Gnome Project
Same thing.

Re:some info about Java Desktop

[timeOday]

I think Sun is fudding Java by not using it for the desktop. At least it certainly raises the question, "why not in Java?"

Re:some info about Java Desktop

[Short Circuit]

Branding it "Java" does invoke the hype-based goodwill of management-types.

Re:some info about Java Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

> At least it certainly raises the question, "why not in Java?"

Because your desktop would be a slow, bloated piece of cr*p, where each simple application would consume about 80MB??

Re:some info about Java Desktop

[tuffy]

Because your desktop would be a slow, bloated piece of cr*p, where each simple application would consume about 80MB??

Nono, each application would run from the same Java runtime. It would bloat up to fill 1GB of RAM and run very very slowly. And, just as you're getting work done, a NullPointerException would take down the entire desktop. Assuming one can set all the proper CLASSPATHs to get the damn thing running in the first place.

I dunno

[Anonymous Coward]

Has Sun learned from the demise of SGI workstations that relying on one processor architecture is harmful?

The lesson I'd learn from SGI is that jumping into the WinTel server market is harmful.

Re:I dunno

[katorga]

Agree. Sun is starting its slide into oblivion.

Re:I dunno

[Anonymous Coward]

Since this box is neither Windows nor Intel just wtf are you agreeing with?

Re:I dunno

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no "Win" or "Tel" in the Sun box. It's a "SolAMD" box.

Re:I dunno

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent "Insightful +5"

Re:I dunno

[upsidedown_duck]

Sun is not taking the retarded path of SGI or Intergraph. The Sun Opteron boxes are certified for Solaris, Linux, and Windows. Sun will provide Solaris or Linux, but customers provide their own Windows (last I checked). For companies who already have Windows site licenses, this is not a problem at all.

Sun are keeping SPARC for data centers and engineering workstations and adding Opteron for everything that Opteron is good at. Sun is making Java and JDS the common thread among the two product lines, leaving people a choice of hardware platform and OS kernel (Solaris/SPARC, Solaris/x86, or Linux/x86).

Re:I dunno

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Sun x86 kit is certified for Windows. Doubt it comes with the stickers tho.

Re:I dunno

[LuSiDe]

SGI just released their new visualisation workstations named Prism. In short, its an Itanium with ATIs running Linux.

Re:I dunno

[AVLaud]

SGI's demise had to do with more than that: 1. Attempting to do hardware, OS AND act one of the primary providers of software on its platform, rather than build developer community (Sun does a much better job of building developer community) 2. Licensing its several graphics technologies to nVidia, which took no time to bridge their gap with SGI thereafter. 3. A major slowdown during the dot.com era following an exodus of key talent (SGI didnt benefit much from the dotcom as much as Sun did)

As I remember...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

SGI started going downhill about the same time they first offered a WinNT machine. But yeh, it's a good thing to homogenize all our processor architectures, because there is only one perfect CPU, and Intel makes it.

Am I the only one who longs for when we actually had a choice of CPUs?

Re:As I remember...

[Reivec]

What are you talking about? Maybe I am just not detecting sarcasm? But right now AMD is kicking some intel butt when it comes to benchmarks... and that is not counting any non x86 procs. I am sure there are arguments for other chips being better due to a better design structure. I personally think the P4 was a bad design from the get go and now they are starting to realize that themselves once they got to a point where they can't just keep ramping up the clock speed. Thus AMD has pulled ahead.

Re:As I remember...

[YetAnotherName]

You run Linux and you can get a choice of Intel i386, IBM PPC G4/G5, and even more ...

Re:As I remember...

[sahtanax]

RTFA.

CPU Type (2) AMD Socket 940*

Re:As I remember...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

No matter how much they tweak it, no matter who takes over making the arch, it's still x86. And x86 isn't bad, in itself... it's bad that it will be one of the few (only?) left. That annoys me. That people think it a good thing, that's plain frightening.

Re:As I remember...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

And 15 years ago, I had x86, 68k, sparc, mips, parisc, alpha, and quite a few more people probably wouldn't even recognize. Linux is ok, don't get me wrong, but I tolerate anything significantly non-Windows.

Re:As I remember...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Get a fucking brain.

Still x86.

Re:As I remember...

[PitaBred]

Because X86 is inherently bad. Right. So why does my laptop run faster than any non-X86 laptop in existence?
Oh, wait, it's a conspiracy. Because RISC is a panacea of goodness. Because X86 isn't just an instruction set, and there is no possibility of a middle ground using good ideas from many camps.
Of course not. The world is black and white, and because Intel came up with it, X86 is OBVIOUSLY black, everything else is white.

</sarcasm>

Re:As I remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod down link spamming troll. Look at this douche's history. Posting comments with almost no content just to get his pyramid scheme link on slashdot.

Re:As I remember...

[Waffle Iron]

And x86 isn't bad, in itself... it's bad that it will be one of the few (only?) left. That annoys me. That people think it a good thing, that's plain frightening.

Can you name one feature (other than endianness or a few percent benchmark edge) that a user or even a C developer would notice that's different between an modern X86 CPU and any other modern CPU?

X86 is just an instruction bytecode format. The internals of today's X86 CPUs vary almost as much as the internals of CPUs with differring instruction sets.

Re:As I remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

"there is only one perfect CPU, and Intel makes it.
Am I the only one who longs for when we actually had a choice of CPUs?"

It's not insightful, it's TROLL CRAP!

off the top of my head...
Transmeta 128bit processor (in my laptop as I type)
PPC
X86
Sun SPARC (there's a new kick ass multi core)
MIPS
ARM
Hell, even the guys who make that RISC CPU the PIC is built around, i forget name at moment) had a 32 bit CPU

Within X86 you can buy intel, via, amd and maybe some others and all three are slowly 'diversifying' design wise. Opteron is extremely flexible for multi processor systema and in dual core will kick ass.

Re:As I remember...

[wobblie]

err, linux runs on all those, and debian provides their distro for all of alpha, arm, hppa, i386, ia64, amd64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390 and sparc.

Re:As I remember...

[homer_ca]

It's not so much that Intel is the perfect CPU. It's just that economies of scale in the x86 CPU market give it a huge advantage over other CPU architectures, and this effect was amplified by the Gigahertz Race between Intel and AMD. They can simply afford to spend more on R&D and sell CPUs for less because of the huge x86 PC market. The only other company in the running is IBM, and they have a good chunk of the desktop CPU market too thanks to Apple.

Re:As I remember...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

would notice that's different between an modern X86 CPU and any other modern CPU?

That's my point though, what other modern CPU? PPC is the last major holdout, though someone *might* make a case for ARM. With not many to pick from, I can't tell you any difference. If we had 10 or 12 arch's though, would my answer be different. Likely it would.

Re:As I remember...

[Waffle Iron]

Yes, most CPUs have converged to a very similar feature set. However, I don't think that you can blame it on the "X86ness" of it. It's just because those are the features that seem to work with today's chip-making technology. It's probably the same reason that all modern jet airliners look almost exactly the same.

Re:As I remember...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Mips has one foot in the coffin. Every time ultrasparc raises its head, Sun execs are sharpening executioners axes. Arm sees more use in the embedded markets, though has made inroads in the PDA market.

The 32bit pic is just another ARM core, iirc.

So that leaves us 2 viable cpu arches in the PC/workstation arena. Or hell, practically anywhere below the supercomputer/mainframe range.

But go ahead, count $3 microcontrollers that will be put in the next Furby toy, if that makes you feel better.

Re:As I remember...

[CodingCrackMonkey]

I decided long ago that I would never buy x86. I've kept to it too, I'm posting from an SGI (IRIX on MIPS). If I'm still using a 300 MHz MIPS in 10 years, so be it. I think x86 is so nasty. It's sad really, choice in CPUs these days means Intel or AMD, but they're really the same thing. I suppose the 64-bit versions are different, but if they still run x86 instructions... what's the point? I'm surprised there aren't more anti-x86 people among the Linux community. In my mind Windows is to operating systems as x86 is to processors.

Re:As I remember...

[magarity]

While you're caustically sarcastic, I don't think you're a troll. In serious response: x86 is the fastest thing commercially available for a very simple reason that has absolutely nothing to do with how well designed it is. Because of backwards compatibility ad nauseum. x86 leaves a lot to be desired from a purist design point of view but it's what works with what is already on the market, both support hardware and software. Look at the hoops Intel jumps through with the Itanium series trying to keep legacy x86 compatibility. Yes, x86 actually *is* inherently lousy, but that's what we've got. It's not because Intel came up with it, it's because its what the market demanded Intel do with each new revision. Back in the 8080 days, x86 was a decent design that balanced several issues of the day. Today, it has been cobbled together from the same old design with amazing new innovations. I assure you, if a magic wand could be waved and a totally new CPU architecture put in place it would be *incredible*. This won't happen, so we deal.

Re:As I remember...

[superpulpsicle]

If the real world was based on benchmarks, we'd be in alot of trouble. Last I check ATI Radeons offer Doom III with 40fps on a 2gig processor. Not in reality, it doesn't.

Benchmarks for AMD are hyped equally as bad as Intel. I have known companies who bought 64bit Opteron and ran their own benchmarks. The results are always far from what these marketing websites propose. Basically...

Marketed Speed - 35% of Marketed Speed = Real life performance

Re:As I remember...

[Slack3r78]

So because they use an external interface that's less than perfect, your main stream solutions are horrible chips? You do realize that, interally, almost any modern x86 CPU is very RISC-like in nature right?

I suppose the 64-bit versions are different, but if they still run x86 instructions... what's the point?

My car gets 40mpg on the highway, but if it still burns nasty old gasoline... what's the point?

Really, other than as a matter of academic holier-than-thou showery, your position is a bit silly. While modern chips are held up some by some legacy underpinnings (BIOS, register starvation in IA32), dismissing the whole architechture as useless for that reason is pointless and burying your head in the sand.

x86 will likely continue to dominate the mainstream for years to come, while RISC/EPIC/Whatever architechtures will be relegated to high end use where their specific strengths matter. If you're happy with a machine significantly underpowered by the standards of *any* modern architechture or dropping several grand on a specialized workstation on ideological ground, then hey, more power to you. Myself, I'll go with what makes the most sense for getting work done in the most economical manner possible.

Re:As I remember...

[Octorian]

Hey, I'm with you on this one. Personally, I am just sick of quirky PC hardware. I know people sometimes talk about their computers having disagreeable personalities. Well its a computer, and computers should not have personalities! They should just work as intended. I should not have to fight with my machine to make it boot off the device I want to, or perform voodoo rituals in response to intermittent issues when stressing things.

Several years ago I got my first non-x86 machine that was powerful enough to be my main desktop (as opposed to an on-the-side tinker machine). It was an SGI Indigo2 (195MHz MIPS R10000). It worked like a dream (ok, an Octane would do much better on I/O with the same CPU, but those were pricy), and I never had any problems with it.

Later on, I finally got around to upgrading my PC (a P2-266 at the time) to an Athlon. However, I never had any love left for the PC at that point. Sure, it worked, but still had its issues. Ever since I got that SGI, I've basically maintained two desktops. The real UNIX workstation for almost everything, and the PC for running games and nothing else.

These days my main desktop is a Sun Ultra 60 (2 x 450MHz UltraSPARC-II). Sure, it may not be as fast as your souped up PC, but for normal tasks it isn't too shabby either. It is also rock solid, doesn't really have "issues or quirks," and I'm quite happy with it.

Re:As I remember...

[Paul Lamere]

Er ...you should check to see who makes the Opteron. Hint ... it's not Intel.

Re:As I remember...

[CodingCrackMonkey]

I don't see how wanting a clean processor architecture makes me conceited. I don't like x86, but it's becomming harder and harder to find alternatives. I don't mind using a computer that's not as fast as the PCs at the local computer store as long as I have the option to use what I like.

Re:As I remember...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

If you weren't a AC retard, I could tell you how to turn off sigs, and expect you to at least be alerted that someone replied.

By definition, sigs can't be on topic. They're personal, and can be a pun or joke, or, simply because we're allowed to use href's in them, I assume CmdrTaco wants us to be able to link to some site we find interesting. More than a few people link to a homepage of their own, or a project they work on. This is what I'm doing.

My comments are often trollish, even more often sarcastic. Some might find them any of the following: annoying, stupid, offensive, misinformed, irrelevant, hypocritical, brilliant, biased, and/or amusing. They are sometimes long, often only a paragraph or two, and when suited to the article, occassional single sentence. Once, on an "ask slashdot - favorite spreadsheet?" only two letters... 'sc'. The tiny, tiny spreadsheet app for console (which is actually quite cool).

On that comment, people accused me of the same thing, btw, but at least they had an excuse... 2 little letters, I mean, I can see how they'd be easy to overlook. So what's your excuse?

I mean, I did ask a question worth asking, I think. The summary of the article mentioned SGI, and also how they Sun was using commodity CPUs. And not only do I not like the "mass extinction event" of CPUs we're seeing today, I remember in particular SGI's first windows workstation, and how it wasn't a year later we were hearing about all their problems. Maybe it's not causation, but at the very least it might well be an indicator.

I figure I own about 80 computers, I've lost count. 5 amigas, 3 Atari STs, a NeXT, sparcstations, an SGI Indy, a slew of 68k macs, TRS-80 6000, PCs, an alpha multia, vaxstations, and damn near every single home computer of the 80s. I even have a 1975 PDP-11/04. Most of them are connected to my hybrid ethernet/tokenring/arcnet/localtalk/ATM155 /corvus/starlan/etc home network. I think I have a right to mention the fact that we've been reduced to just 2 major CPU architectures.

Or maybe you don't like anonymous networks. Or maybe you like freenet to the exclusion of all else. Or even possibly you take issue with my recruitment efforts, on a project that by it's nature has to be invitation only, and invitation to people to a foreign country no less (how many of you have 20+ friends outside your country's borders?). These would at least be valid.

But I take exception to being called a link spammer. If you hate link spammers, pester the editors to stop posting that roland piqueville shit, where every article is a single link to something on his blog. I'm not trying to get a higher rank in google, it's blocked by my robots.txt! I just want a few people to inquire, and help me build another internetwork, for crying out loud! One where we can't be sued for lame shit. And once every few months, someone asks for a connection, and maybe 1 in 5 of those remain for any length of time. I've never seen you bitch at people offering gmail invites, even that asshat that offers them in return for his ipop scheme, which is about as Ponzi as anything I've seen here.

So just lay off it. Or learn to turn sigs off, or at the very least, don't post as a fucking AC coward.

Re:As I remember...

[Mr. Frilly]

I'm in agreement with the above poster.

If you think about it, Intel tried to kill the x86 line at least twice (Itanium, i860), both times with absolutely no success due to market and competitor forces.

The only chip out that that's truly competed with the x86 instruction set for general purpose computing has been the PPC, but that's really only because Mac decided to go that route when they switched away from the 68000 processors. How many people ran Windows NT on Alpha, PPC, or MIPS? If Mac had offered both x86 and PPC hardware, do you think PPC would of survived?

The simple fact of the matter is, that even with all the legacy warts on the instruction set, it gets the job done. Nobody's going to give up affordability and backwards compatability in exchange for "engineering elegance" and perhaps a small performance gain, especially when you can just stick with x86 for 6 months and wait for Moore's law to catch up.

Re:As I remember...

[BlackSabbath]

You obviously haven't tried Mac OS X on a G4 or G5.

The difference in the experience is largely due to the vector processing support.

I'd take a PowerPC at half the clock-rate of an Intel, ANY day (specifically, the day that I can afford my own iMac G5, although earlier is acceptable if anyone is feeling particularly charitable).

Re:As I remember...

[Slack3r78]

It was more the tone of your post than anything. You make it sound like there's no real alternative to x86 on the market, when the case is quite the contrary. Even in the consumer-oriented market, there's at least Apple/PPC, but you made using a 300MHz MIPS out to be a badge of pride, holding out unagainst the unholy alternative. Alternative platforms are still out there, they're just pricey in relation to commodity equipment. Welcome to a normal market system.

The fact is, there are, and will continue to be alternatives, but they're niche products. Most people are fairly pragmatic and don't care what the processor is so long as it works and does what they wish. When compaitbility and software availibility are issues, the market is going to drift toward a single, mainstream option. Niches exist, but that's exactly what they are, and they're going to be expensive.

I don't particularly care for x86 myself. I'm also looking at picking up an Apple machine in the near future, but processor architechture has nearly zero relavence in the decision - I simply feel I'd be better able to get work done on a Mac. As I stated before, a modern x86 processor has *very* little in common with the original x86 design outside of the instruction set.

Hell, if you want to be technical, even the original Pentium was a RISC chip with an x86 wrapper - about 1/3 of its transistors were dedicated to x86 compatibility. It took a significant performance hit for it compared to then current RISC chips which could dedicated that silicon to getting actual work done. But in today's environment, with transistor budgets in the tens of millions, it doesn't really matter. This is the reason I don't see the point in going against the grain other than just to be different. Each platform has its merits, and for an overwhelming majority of people, x86 is the best overall solution.

If you have the need and desire to justify spending more on an alternative, again, that's fine. I just feel that it's rather pointless to bitch about normal market convergence and commoditization as a negative.

Re:As I remember...

[dohcvtec]

And 15 years ago, I had x86, 68k, sparc, mips, parisc, alpha, and quite a few more people probably wouldn't even recognize.

Uhhh... do you realize that SPARC, MIPS, and PA-RISC are still in production? Even though at times it may seem like it, all the world is not an x86; there still is choice among architectures.

Re:As I remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

ARM outsells x86 chips.... I believe that case makes itself. I think some peoples perceptions of "what is a computer" needs to be changed and they will realize that there is a lot of choice out there... all depends on what you want to do.

Re:As I remember...

[Waffle Iron]

X86s have SIMD units too; they are comparable to the PPC units. The PPC may have better CPI as you point out, but many X86s go to higher frequencies. The difference means little to the end user.

Any difference in "experience" is most likely due to a combination of your OS and the placebo effect.

Re:As I remember...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

PArisc and Alpha are scheduled for death. Mips is up in the air. Sparc is well, really nervous.

But PArisc will not make a comeback. And I'm not too far off in predicting the death of the other two, I just don't see anyone keeping them alive.

Re:As I remember...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Yes, because ARMs are used in everything. Cable modems, my old Newton, new PocketPCs and Ipaqs...hell, I think they're using in automotive stuff.

But only the british RiscPC was a true computer that used the arch. I *might* concede the PDA stuff.

But for CPUs that are actually used in computers, they just aren't a viable candidate (yet; who knows if they might be used for that in the future, they are a nice little cpu). Even if they are used someday, that only raises the CPU count to 3: x86, PPC, and ARM.

Re:As I remember...

[Trailer Trash]

An architecture is far more than just an instruction set. There are two major differences between X86 and most other modern CPUs:

1. Poverty of registers. This affects performance greatly. Now, yeah, a C programmer or users wouldn't notice right off, but the performance difference at a given clock speed between X86 and, say, G5, is staggering. Register poverty is one of the main reasons. I believe this is fixed in the X86-64 architecture. Under 32-bit, the problem is caused by the legacy architecture that had registers A-D, and the four segment/address registers. In contrast, most modern CPUs have 32, 64, or 128 registers. Even the VAX had 13 general purpose registers in 1978.

2. Bus contention. Again, fixed by AMD recently, but (briefly) PCI and memory access generally require the same bus, slowing the system down. This is not an issue for most other architectures, leading to great IO performance deficit in X86.

I haven't done assembly-level programming in a few years, but those are the things that stick out for me. You're right that at a high-level, it's capable of doing everything that a Sparc or whatever can do, but, then again, so can a Turing machine.

Re:As I remember...

[bob beta]

True, but at least the last time I checked, there was a StrongARM ATX footprint motherboard you could use. Links to it (used?) to be on the NetBSD website. It was from a company called Chalice if I remember right.

It was bloodly expensive, but it was targeted as a low-volume 'reference' platform. Probably there are some in labs being used to do all sorts of useful development, tho.

Re:As I remember...

[bob beta]

These days my main desktop is a Sun Ultra 60 (2 x 450MHz UltraSPARC-II). Sure, it may not be as fast as your souped up PC, but for normal tasks it isn't too shabby either. It is also rock solid, doesn't really have "issues or quirks," and I'm quite happy with it.

That's true, as far as you go. But there are many different 'dekstop systems' you can select that don't have 'issues or quirks' as long as you stay with the base system, don't pile on a lot of extra hardware addins and crap, etc.

I have a Slackware system that runs on a cheap (I paid about fourty cents for it at auction) Dell Optiplex with PIII processor. It doesn't have 'quirks or issues' to speak of.

Please, mind you, don't interpret this as me talking up Dell crap incomparison to an Ultra 60, of course. I'd trade even (or four Dells for the Sun) anyday for a nice U60. I'm just trying to make the point that so long as you don't drag in a lot of drivers and shit for third party stuff, you can do pretty well with a lot of 'single vendor' desktop arrangements.

The trouble comes in when you start plugging in third party video hardware, shitty ethernet cards with third party drivers, etc. Or when you buy a clone case and start screwing down 'performance' boards in it from hotdog hardware site reviews, etc.

Re:As I remember...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Thanks for the tip. I need to find one of these...

Re:As I remember...

[bob beta]

There's a whole NetBSD port to that motherboard and apparently a near relative Intel makes:

NetBSD/cats

Links to the hardware through that page.

Re:As I remember...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Redundant moderations on the 3rd non-nested comment. Lame.

Re:As I remember...

[runderwo]

1. P6 and later Intel CPUs have had register renaming and more internal registers for a long time now. The big problem with this approach is that the compiler can't help you at all, so for performance you are completely dependent on the hardware's instruction reordering, branch prediction, and speculative execution. It would be difficult for me to agree that Intel was left behind in any large part because of its legacy appearance to the programmer - the P6 core was an excellent performer for a long time considering its roots.

2. CPU and PCI memory accesses are independent and mutually exclusive. Considering that the alternative to PCI DMA would be the CPU shuffling one word at a time to the board, I don't really see what the problem is here.

Re:The chance *BSD will run on these things:

[ebooher]

I don't understand here, why are you saying there is a 0% chance of the machines running *BSD? Is it meant to be humorous? Because obviously they will run *BSD very well. Am I feeding the troll here?

What would really be surprising

[overshoot]

would be if they actually got their X11 implementation working almost as well as an etch-a-sketch.

I finally escaped from 7 years on a Sun workstation to a Linux box. Solaris had its advantages, but X11 wasn't one of them and CDE wasn't another.

Re:What would really be surprising

[sneakers563]

I thought Sun had switched to Gnome. Is that wrong? The only Sun we have at work is an old Sparc 20 running Solaris 2.5.1 so I really don't know.

Re:What would really be surprising

[Jahf]

The magic of Opteron is that you can be using a Sun workstation, getting low-cost high-performance Opteron CPUs and also be running Linux. I think that was the purpose of the article.

(written on a Sun w2100z dual Opteron box running Ubuntu AMD64 Linux with VMWare installed).

Re:What would really be surprising

[idiotnot]

the beta of sol10 x86 I've been running uses x.org. No problems at all with my Radeon 9k. Accel 2D only.

Re:What would really be surprising

[Octorian]

High performance, sure. Low cost? You've got to be kidding. The price is almost the same as the Sun Blade 2500, which is a dual 1.26GHz UltraSPARC-IIIi machine. (of course they also look quite similar on the outside, and may share some bits)

Of course it is still cheaper than an IBM POWER-based workstation. Too bad IBM always prices their low-end machines out of the market, even though there higher-end stuff can be a pretty good deal.

Re:What would really be surprising

[Col. Bloodnok]

I finally escaped from 7 years on a Sun workstation to a Linux box. Solaris had its advantages, but X11 wasn't one of them and CDE wasn't another.

CDE might look like Windows 3.11 and be a heap of steaming clag - that's because it was designed by committee: Novell, IBM, Sun and some others. The best thing you can say about it is: it works, and it has done for years. Reliably.

I moved from OpenLook to CDE to WindowMaker and haven't really looked back. There's not much wrong with the X server itself. It's got a few things missing, but Xinerama and XRENDER were added in Solaris 8/9. The Sun OpenGL implementation is textbook and GNOME and KDE are both available, Star/OpenOffice and firefox are there. What's the problem?

It's not as responsive as it is on a Linux PC, but that's because the scheduling is tuned differently. I persoanlly prefer it done the Solaris way myself, but I mainly only run xterms, with the occaisonal firefox, thunderbird and OpenOffice session and some other services running smoothly in the background. Each to their own, I suppose.

Anyone who's looked after a SunRay server can testify to how solid and reliable the Solaris X server is these days.

Re:What would really be surprising

[Jahf]

Apples : Oranges ... the "low cost" was in the context of the article talking about Sun offering some of the most affordable Opteron workstations.

Besides ... I have used USPARC-IIIi boxes and am using a w2100z right now. The Opteron platform has caught up to many of the speed advantages of the USPARC, especially when you get the peripherals up to equal specs (SCSI, memory type, etc). Hypertransport for memory shuttling and U320 for SCSI combined with running the Opteron in native 64-bits does a LOT to catch up to the USPARC boxes.

As with any comparison, there are things that one arch will do better than the other (including Xeon, which kicks Opteron on matrix functions) but overall the advantages between SPARC64 and AMD64 are alot flatter than SPARC64 to IA32.

Re:What would really be surprising

[upsidedown_duck]

Solaris had its advantages, but X11 wasn't one of them and CDE wasn't another.

1) Your Sun workstation had a genuine and complete OpenGL implementation.
2) Sun provides the configuration for the X server, so you don't have to.
3) Sun's packages generally update the X server configuration for you, so you don't have to.
4) XDM for remote logins works out of the box.
5) Sun's drivers are integration tested with the hardware, so there are few suprises.

The only detractions I can say about Xsun/CDE are that there are extensions becoming popular in the XFree86/X.org realm that Sun hasn't adopted, yet, and that CDE, while functional, definitely has some flakes. However, I still use CDE, because GNOME still has a long way to go (looking foward to seeing how Solaris 10's GNOME works).

On the flip side, getting OpenGL working under many PC configurations is a flat out nightmare, and the configurations files are also a nightmare. Linux/X.org are nice, but even a rose has thorns.

Re:What would really be surprising

[bob beta]

You can probably do special stuff when installing a current release of Solaris, if you want to be mired down in CDE. The default Solaris desktop these days, is Gnome.

Re:What would really be surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

JDS3 ships with X.org, so now you don't need to use either of them on a Sun box :)

Need modern workstation

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn! If I only had a MODERN Sun workstation it might just have been fast enough to get first pos!

On the subject of workstations though... At a train station, trains stop. At a bus stations, buses stop. What does work do at a workstation?

Re:Need modern workstation

[RAMMS EIN]

``On the subject of workstations though... At a train station, trains stop. At a bus stations, buses stop. What does work do at a workstation?''

It depends. If it runs Slowlaris, it obviously slows.

(And if it runs Windows, it slows and then crashes)

Re:Need modern workstation

[triso]

On the subject of workstations though... At a train station, trains stop. At a bus stations, buses stop. What does work do at a workstation?

Your glass is half-empty: trains also start at train stations and buses also start at bus stations.

Re:Need modern workstation

[akadruid]

Your glass is half-empty: trains also start at train stations and buses also start at bus stations.

You don't live in the UK then. Trains starting or stopping at stations is considered foolish optomism here.

Usual behaviour is considered to be failing to arrive, failing to go anywhere, getting halfway and breaking down or just sitting for hours at a time in the middle of nowhere. On a good day. With the right kind of leaves. And the wrong kind of Terrorists.

Re:Need modern workstation

[temojen]

Posts on slashdot.

Re:Need modern workstation

[Deorus]

> Your glass is half-empty: trains also start at train stations and buses also start at bus stations.

Similarly, workstations also reboot.

Their Xeon trade-in program is still going on too

[megalomang]

Coupled with the xeon trade-in program, you can take a further $600 off off the w2100z price.

I wonder how much AMD is subsidizing the deal to gain more market saturation?

The truth is, the xeon is incredibly popular. I still can't get over how HP dropped itanium due to xeon. So why won't Sun sell a xeon?

For those who don't want to click through...

[GillBates0]

Direct link to the Conclusions page

The results of the SPEC benchmarks (Page 8) look quite impressive, from a cursory look at the graphs (more=better). It seemed to outperform RH9 and SuSE9.1 on most of them.

Quite an extensive review IMHO.

Re:For those who don't want to click through...

[Jameth]

Yeah it does good on SPEC (page 8) then proceeds to come in dead last on basically every other benchmark (pages 9 to 13).

Not so impressive as you are implying (although it is basically silent and damn cool, apparently, so it's not bad either).

Re:For those who don't want to click through...

[cadence007]

I disagree... I went through those pages, and didn't see it coming in "as you are implying"... "dead last" ... I was going to mod yours as flamebait after checking up on it, but decided a response would be more useful I think. I then had to undo some other mod points i did earlier on the discussion, in order to post this reply. :

Re:For those who don't want to click through...

[MojoStan]

Yeah it does good on SPEC (page 8) then proceeds to come in dead last on basically every other benchmark (pages 9 to 13).

Not so impressive as you are implying...

But we should also note, for those who don't want to click through, that JDS 2.0 (Sun Java Desktop System) uses the 32-bit Linux 2.4 kernel while the others (SuSE 9.1, RedHat 9) use the 64-bit Linux 2.6.8 kernel. JDS's 32-bit binaries lagged behind SuSE's and RedHat's 64-bit binaries in those benchmarks.

Page 5 says that JDS's apps and kernel are "fairly dated," but Sun designed JDS as an enterprise operating system with tech support from Sun. Thus, "workstation stability is paramount." Maybe JDS is like a workstation version of Debian "stable." JDS may not have the latest features and performance tweaks, but it's more stable and easier to support.

Also, for those who want the whole article on one page, here's a link to the one-page version:

Sun's w2100z Dual Opteron Workstation (1-page version)

Re:The chance *BSD will run on these things:

[red floyd]

why are you saying there is a 0% chance of the machines running *BSD?

<JOKE>
Because *BSD is dead. Netcraft confirms it!
</JOKE>

Waves hand impatiently in a dismissive fashion

[Matey-O]

Yes, but how did it stack up in Doom3?

Re:Waves hand impatiently in a dismissive fashion

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but how did it stack up in Doom3?

if it is like other amd offerings it was a burnt one

Re:Waves hand impatiently in a dismissive fashion

[bob beta]

Not sure about Doom3, but I was running five copies of XDoom v.1 simulatneously on an X desktop on Linux with the 1.2 kernel, in 1995. All those X Windows running recorded Doom sessions out of sync with each other was pretty dazzling at the time.

This was on a 486 with 16 megs of RAM. Back when friends would struggle to get a single session of Doom running on a Microsoft OS on similar hardware. I think the key is 'Unix', or rather, not-Microsoft. The XDoom of the time for SGI was damn cool, too.

Re:Their Xeon trade-in program is still going on t

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually they have been selling Xeon servers for a few years...of course the opteron blows xeon out of the water so they might as well get rid of them.

Typical

[DNS-and-BIND]

Everyone in the PC world worries about cost as their main consideration. Well, that's only an issue if you have one system, and you pay for that yourself. Real Computers, individuals don't buy them, and believe it or not, price is occasionally not the first and last consideration.

Re:Typical

[DAldredge]

And what is a real computer?

Re:Typical

[temojen]

Computers, individuals don't buy them, and believe it or not, price is occasionally not the first and last consideration.

It's the availability of infinitely long tapes.

Re:Typical

[DNS-and-BIND]

Never used one, eh?

Re:Typical

[DAldredge]

Yes, I have. I just need to know what YOU consider a 'real computer'.

Never mind...

[sneakers563]

Never mind. I'll just RTFA...

Here Comes the SUN...again

[Eberlin]

Are we talking about SUN the hardware company or SUN the Solaris folks? Hey, aren't they the ones that bought out the folks that eventually led to Star Office? Wait, I think they mentioned Java Desktop so is the compile-once-run-anywhere SUN?

Oh, Java Desktop is Linux with some java-related enhancements? Boy, these guys must really like Linux to be using it. Didn't they buy Cobalt before...and those things used Linux? I'm glad a large company is getting behind Linux in such a big way.

Wait, now I'm confused...they don't LIKE Linux?

Anyone know what SUN does for a living? Reminds me of a slacker surfer dude with all these different "money-making" schemes they keep pitching. Diversifying sounds more and more like treading water.

Re:Here Comes the SUN...again

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun or SUNW, *not* SUN.

Re:Here Comes the SUN...again

[ebooher]

Actually SUN likes Linux just fine. Very happy with the decisions buyers are making with their hardware and a Linux OS, and with how Linux is shaping up in the world around them, actually. They just don't like Red Hat. Which, say it with me now, is *not* Linux. They are a distro. The CTO has some quotes running around the web about it. I think Red Hat stepped on one too many toes at SUN or something.

Re:Here Comes the SUN...again

[bigjnsa500]

No, Java Desktop IS Linux. Its based on SuSE 8.1. The next release will be based on SuSe 9.1.

Re:Here Comes the SUN...again

[Eberlin]

Sun is characterizing Red Hat as Linux. In the long run, it's a rival to Solaris and its popularity in the x86 platform isn't helping Sun's hardware sales either.

I highly doubt that they're all too fond of Linux in general...and if they could take it out of the equation, they'd do so in a heartbeat. I'm sure they want it out of the picture...but is going to attempt to do so one distro at a time starting with RH.

Re:Here Comes the SUN...again

[leoc]

Luckily for Sun I use Suse 9, which is also better than Solaris, but at least it ain't Red Hat!

Re:Here Comes the SUN...again

[tesmako]

Sun is characterizing Red Hat as Linux.

You seem to have gotten it backwards, a quick google says the opposite.

Re:Here Comes the SUN...again

[bhtooefr]

FWIW, Java Desktop System (their distro) is SuSE based.

Re:Here Comes the SUN...again

[Col. Bloodnok]

Sun and Red Hat had a decent enough relationship 2 years ago - RHES was being certified and supported on some of Sun's intel based rackmount servers, but Red Hat just kept knifing them in the back on big deals. Now Sun *hate* their guts.

Sun are now looking fairly enthusiastically at Linux on low-end boxes, if that's what the customer wants. Of course Sun prefer Solaris, because they *know* how Solaris performs/scales/breaks *really* well. Deploying any large IT project is inherently less risky when you use stuff you've used before. For example, if it's a SunPS led project and serious uptime guarentees ($$$) are at stake, you know it'll be a big name app running on clustered, big-iron SPARC/Solaris. Linux might feature in particular areas in the infrastructure - DNS, webserving etc. - but it probably won't be in any of the crucial parts of the system.

For many of Sun's big customers - especially those who have bought nothing but Sun since the early 90's, Linux won't fit well into their organisation, without significant extra work (all the tedious stuff - build creation, testing, systems management, backup). Sun wouldn't be taken seriously if they they did push it.

The markets differ, of course. Linux is likely to feature much more in the edu sector, for example. Whereas many financial applications still *only* run on Sybase/Solaris, though the trend is definately going in the Java direction.

Your 'one distro at a time' theory is just wrong.

Re:Here Comes the SUN...again

[sundling]

Sun says they love linux, but they hate Red Hat

[moderators, you consider the parent post informative?! Maybe funny if it's meant sarcastically]
Yes this is the sun that brought us Solaris, Java, Open Office, NFS, and they've dabled with Linux for a while. Let's face it, Linux is a Unix and sun has done Unix for decades.

Solaris is even going open source next month.

Paul

Re:Here Comes the SUN...again

[bgeerdes]

Java Desktop is *not* Linux. It runs on Solaris (x86 & Sparc) as well.

Re:Here Comes the SUN...again

[Anonymous Coward]

stop talking crap rhymelu53r

Don't call this a comeback, been here for years

[ebooher]

The title is a little interesting to me. The Return of the SUN Workstation. Does this mean to say that the current versions of UltraSPARC and Sun Blade systems shouldn't be considered workstations? What do we (as a /. community) describe workstation as, anyway? Do we mean to say really high end 3D work in CAD/CAM, etc? Is the lowly XP machine I'm forced to use at work a "workstation" because it's where I get work done?

The new Java Workstation series with the AMD Opteron processor is a pretty neat box. Hit SUN.com and download their PDF's on the machine. One includes a diagram/schematic of the motherboard. The motherboard is the mainboard and daughterboard. The daughterboard happens to house the PCI bus and associated gear as well as the SCSI adapter onboard. I wonder why. Will SUN later introduce a different daughterboard with some other version of expansion upgradability? Maybe with SATA instead of SCSI? Just a way to keep the mainboard more flexible?

It also needs to be said that this isn't just a dual Opteron machine. There is a single proc version of the motherboard. They are also as full on x86 as you can get. No really out there ROMs or chips that only SUN knows about, because they are rated to run Windows as well.

So the units will run all x86 OS's without a hitch, they just happen to have some SUN engineering behind them as well as the SUN name. I think the main push for the Opteron was that they have an entry level server built around it. SUN knows that not everybody buys really high end multi $$K machines and that some data centers only need one or two sub $1K servers.

Is this why SUN is so vocal about their new found friends at Microsoft? Because they knew they would be releasing x86 gear that would be certified for Windows Server products and wanted to make sure the world knew that you didn't have to get your WinBoxes from Dell or HP anymore?

Re:Don't call this a comeback, been here for years

[CaptKilljoy]

>The title is a little interesting to me. The Return of the SUN Workstation. Does this mean to say that the current versions of UltraSPARC and Sun Blade systems shouldn't be considered workstations?

No, I think that it alludes to Sun's origins as a manufacturer of cheap UNIX workstations/servers based on the commodity processors of that era (Motorola 680x0).

Re:Don't call this a comeback, been here for years

[ArbitraryConstant]

"The title is a little interesting to me. The Return of the SUN Workstation. Does this mean to say that the current versions of UltraSPARC and Sun Blade systems shouldn't be considered workstations? What do we (as a /. community) describe workstation as, anyway? Do we mean to say really high end 3D work in CAD/CAM, etc? Is the lowly XP machine I'm forced to use at work a "workstation" because it's where I get work done?"

It's a "return" because from a performance standpoint, SPARC can't keep up anymore.

Re:Don't call this a comeback, been here for years

[shokk]

On Slashdot, a workstation is anything you can install a distro on one week, load some cool wm skinz, browse the web, read email, and then lather rinse repeat the next week with a new distro. All the while calling that work, and shrieking curses in the wind in the direction of Redmond, WA. Did I miss anything?

Re:Their Xeon trade-in program is still going on t

[Jahf]

Actually the best way to buy a w2100z, if you don't need it -today- but do want it cheap, is to buy off of Ebay. They are regularly going for about 1/2 the retail price.

And AMD isn't subsidizing this at all, at least not actively. Sun just happens to be willing to sell for much lower than their traditional margins on these products to get back some of the workstation market. They have realized that workstations were a wedge into the hearts and minds of the admins who later (sometimes years later) made decisions on servers. And Sun has some very well priced Opteron servers now, too.

Re:Their Xeon trade-in program is still going on t

[megalomang]

I thought they only sold xeon servers, not workstations. I looked into it a while back, but maybe I missed something...

Sun may survive this

[RealAlaskan]

Sun used to be all about high-quality hardware, where cost took a backseat to reliability. I wonder if they'll be able to keep their reputation for quality and support now that they're competing with HP and Walmart at the low end?

Another post pointed out that SGI started to self-destruct when they started selling Windows NT boxes. At least Sun is peddling these with Solaris, so they aren't literally going into the Dell/Walmart end of the market.

Re:Sun may survive this

[PitaBred]

The military has already learned a lot of the lessons that Sun is demonstrating here.
Off-The Shelf components tend to be a hell of a lot cheaper, and do the job just as well, if not better. It costs a lot of money to make a specialized system. Especially for something as relatively general-purpose as a computer. It's cheaper to fix them when they break (don't kid yourself... ALL systems break sometime), leverages scaling of production, etc.
Basically, it's the only decision they could make and still stay relevant.
Anyone remember Cray? Didn't think so. Supercomputers may be a better solution in some very specific cases, but not enough to warrant the kind of money that goes into them. This is business, after all. Not NASA.

Re:Sun may survive this

[tesmako]

While these machines are low-end for Sun, they are way above the high-end of Walmart.

Re:Sun may survive this

[bhtooefr]

Anyone remember Cray?

Why, yes, I do. They learned that lesson too, and are now using Opterons...

Sounds like a good linux platform

[argoff]

Would you be surprised to hear Sun is the lowest cost Tier 1 dual-Opteron provider?

Yes I would be. Anyhow, sounds like a good reason to get one, format the drive - wipe solaris and install Linux on it to get all the apps. Thanks Sun

Re:Sounds like a good linux platform

[stratjakt]

Except for the custom firmware or whatever Sun jammed in to prevent you from doing just that.

Re:Sounds like a good linux platform

[bersl2]

This workstation doesn't come with an OS.

Re:Sounds like a good linux platform

[Erect Horsecock]

You can have linux preinstalled on it...

Re:Sounds like a good linux platform

[ebooher]

Nope, no custom firmware. From: http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/w2100z/

The dual-processor Sun Java Workstation W2100z, first in a new line of AMD Opteron processor-based workstations from Sun, delivers ultimate performance, visualization-class graphics solutions, high I/O throughput, and the ability to deploy large data sets (up to 16 GB in size) across multiple operating systems, including the Solaris OS, Linux, and Windows.

Re:Sounds like a good linux platform

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop hyping Linux. If for some reason you don't like Solaris install a real OS, NetBSD or FreeBSD. Linux is for ricers.

Re:Sounds like a good linux platform

[RAMMS EIN]

From what I've been hearing, you might actually want to run Solaris 10 on the box. Sadly, I haven't been able to get it on my Ultra 5, as it refuses to boot from CD-ROM, and I can't figure out how to get the files needed for a network boot (as I did for NetBSD).

Re:Sounds like a good linux platform

[chobee]

You can use the install cd's to create a boot server. Boot server has to be solaris also. Find another sun machine, mount the cd. On the main cd (not the install cd but cd #1 which is really the second cd) issue the setup_install_server command. Then on the third cd do the same. After that issue the add_install_client command with mac address of the server you want to netboot with.

Re:Sounds like a good linux platform

[stratjakt]

Then I take it all back. Yay Sun!

Re:Sounds like a good linux platform

[RAMMS EIN]

Thanks for the advice. I actually knew that, as I did RTFM. The problem is that I don't have another Sun box, and I won't spend the several hours it takes to install Solaris on my PC. If somebody could send me the necessary files I'm sure I could serve them to the Ultra somehow.

Re:Sounds like a good linux platform

[farble1670]

Thanks Sun and sun will thank you. they make way more $ off you buying boxes then running solaris (which you can obtain for free, minus the support). these boxes also work great for windows, we have quite of few of them in our lab.

Re:Sounds like a good linux platform

[Octorian]

Boot server actually doesn't have to be Solaris. I've installed many a Sun machine using a FreeBSD box as my boot/install server. You just have to know how to configure it, since the Sun-provided scripts won't do it all for you on non-Solaris.

Re:Sounds like a good linux platform

[0racle]

This is what I used to install Solaris from a Slackware system. The instructions are for Solaris 8 and if I remember there was a little problem, but between this and the script that is on the install CD to setup a Solaris Netboot server, you should have enough documentation to get it running.

Re:Sounds like a good linux platform

[chegosaurus]

Which apps would they be?

Blech...

[Krimsen]

Why not get even cheaper!

Re:Blech...

[bofkentucky]

Can you get a Sun Support contract on that? Sorry, I'll pass, I like having the knowledge that if my datacenter gets hit by a metor, my replacement servers, spec'ed just like the contract, are on the truck ASAP. Restore last night's backup, and it's like it never happened, well, as soon as the guys from AT&T re-route my fiber through a crater.

w2100z. w00t!

[micromoog]

Every time I see w2100z, my internal 1337-sp34k decoder kicks on. Then I realize it's the actual product name.

Re: The return of the Sun Workstation, With AMD's

[OccidentalSlashy]

Would you be surprised to hear Sun is the lowest cost Tier 1 dual-Opteron provider?

Yes I would be surprised, and I don't even know what that is! Wow!

one processor architecture

[cadelor]

Has Sun learned from the demise of SGI workstations that relying on one processor architecture is harmful?
Huh? The ultra 5, 10, sunblade 1500 and 150 were single processor. The ultra 60, sunblade 2000, sunblade 2500 are dual.
Sun was never relying on one processor, there have always been dual options.
The W1100z is the single processor version of the W2100z described in the article.
http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/hardware/d ocs/Workstation_Products/Workstations/index.html Suns workstation docs.

Re:one processor architecture

[the grand asdfer]

I believe the poster was referring to the processor architecture ie sparc vs x86 etc

Re:one processor architecture

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you even read? One processor architecture. It means sticking to SPARC only. That comment is pretty much bullshit. Both SGI and Sun tried x86 offerings many moons ago and then decided they needed something more powerful (remember the Sun 386i box and early SGI boxen with i386 cpus). It was in fact, that Beluzzo idiot and his let's go WindowsNT that almost killed SGI. HP is going the same way, btw.

Re:one processor architecture

[PitaBred]

I think you missed the word 'architecture' in there. The blades and such all use the same type of processor. The Opteron is an X86 based processor, a total departure from what they have otherwise.
No one ever said anything about the actual number of processors.

Re:one processor architecture

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck are you on? I've got a quad processor SPARCstation 20 right here, right now.

"Dual options"?
What the fuck are you on, you've been able to 64x, 128x ... Sun shit for fuckin years.

What the fuck are you on?

Re:one processor architecture

[cadelor]

ok that makes a little more sence. Though Solaris has always been available for x86 provided your hadware was compatible with the hardware compatability list. And Sun has been selling x86 kit since the LX50 came out over 2 years ago.

Damnit... where's SGI?

[torpor]

C'mon SGI, rise from the Dead, bring on a new daemon, and teach these fools how to make laptops .. or .. something ..

Darn. for a while there, the 80's and 90's were cool. all we have left now are Apple .. and Sun ..

Re:Damnit... where's SGI?

[Octorian]

I'd love to see SGI try and make a laptop, considering that there have already been UltraSPARC laptops, PA-RISC laptops, and RS/6000 laptops.

Of course it would have a beautiful case in red or purple, would have an excellent display and graphics hardware, and would be reasonable in size. Of course it would only last 5 minutes on a full battery charge (need to plug it in), and would easily weight 30 lbs. ;)

Re:Damnit... where's SGI?

[solios]

As cool as a portable IRIX box would be (the ones in Twister don't count... they were cabled to offscreen Indys. :P), and as much freeware as there is available for IRIX 6.5.X, uh.... what would you run on it these days that would really require serious portability?

Since it's a Real UNIX, all you need is a cheap PC or Mac and Putty or Terminal.app to connect to a Serious Machine elsewhere. :)

Of course, an SGI laptop would make a Panasonic Toughbook look like tissue paper. 30lbs of HIGH TENSILE STEEL, BABY.

Man, the military would eat that shit up.

Re:Damn Story Titles

[mrchaotica]

I'm going to stop before I amuse myself past the limits of what the moderators will allow.

(Score:0, Offtopic)

Too late!

Dual G5 Comparison?

[RAMMS EIN]

I wonder how these babies stack up against the dual G5 machines Apple has been offering. Looking at the specs, the Mac looks like a better deal. Upgrading the memory to 4 GB brings the price to $5,249.00, just a bit below the white box alternative Anand proposes for the w2100z (the w2100z itself costing some $8600). Of course, price is only one aspect.

Re:Dual G5 Comparison?

[codepunk]

How about I just grab about 5 2gh machines off of pricewatch for a 150$ a piece and load up mosix and kick the shit out of both of those boxes.

Re:Dual G5 Comparison?

[stratjakt]

Do those Apple machines run Solaris or Windows Server?

Re:Dual G5 Comparison?

[ArbitraryConstant]

" I wonder how these babies stack up against the dual G5 machines Apple has been offering. Looking at the specs, the Mac looks like a better deal."

As always, it depends on what you want it for.

The w2100z (and the single processor w1100z) have a 10k RPM Ultra320 SCSI drive, ECC memory, etc. These machines are built to be much more reliable than anything meant for the desktop from any OEM (including Apple). Also, for some tasks, the Opteron has an edge over the G5 for various reasons (on die memory controller reduces latency, bigger cache, etc).

Another consideration is the OS choice. It'll run Windows (if for some reason you wanted to run Windows), Linux*, and Solaris. There are some things for which MacOS is better suited (that would be I own an Apple computer), but there's plenty of stuff for which Solaris or Linux is better suited.

Like I said. It depends on what you want it for.

* - Note that while Linux will run on Apple hardware, stuff like Java is not available, and some things don't run properly.

Re:Dual G5 Comparison?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how these babies stack up against the dual G5 machines Apple has been offering.

They don't run Mac OS X.

Re:Dual G5 Comparison?

[hawaiian717]

* - Note that while Linux will run on Apple hardware, stuff like Java is not available, and some things don't run properly.

Gentoo Portage lists both Blackdown (1.3.1-r9) and IBM (1.4.1-r1 and 1.4.2) Java Runtime Environments as being available for PowerPC.

http://packages.gentoo.org/search/?sstring=jre

Re:Dual G5 Comparison?

[hawaiian717]

Do those Apple machines run Solaris or Windows Server?

It might take a little work, but it should. http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/virtualpc/vi rtualpc.aspx?pid=virtualpc

Of course, you could also just run Mac OS X Server.

Re:Their Xeon trade-in program is still going on t

[Jahf]

Must have been awhile back ...

Sun's Xeon servers (V60x and V65x) came out about 15 months ago. The LX50 (a P3 Xeon based server) came out about a year before that.

Sun's Opteron servers (V20z and V40z) started showing up about 6 months ago.

Sun doesn't have any Intel based workstations ... the trade-in programs are generally to encourage people to give up their Xeons from other sources :)

Sun's Opteron workstations (w1100z and w2100z) started showing up a couple months ago.

Sun also has a low voltage Xeon Blade and an Athlon XP Blade. Based on trends I wouldn't be surprised to see an Opteron Blade if power requirements allow.

It is pretty obvious that it was so much x86 that Sun was against as it was Intel. When I was in Sun's entry-level server group the decision to use Xeon's was only grudgingly done because the Opterons kept getting pushed out. With a 64-bit CPU from an Intel competitor it looks like Sun is alot more comfortable with the relationship on the low-end. Opterons currently max out at 8 CPUs (I think) which is about the point where Sun's SPARC starts to really shine, so it has a lot of synergy.

Crap review

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like Anand is only used to off the shelf PC hardware. How could he be impressed by this hardware is beyond me. Dude, have a look at Sun's older hardware, SS20 or even the Ultra1 for example, and you'll see what rock solid hardware is about.

About the hardware, looks pretty good, except the NVidia card. Time passes and they still put el-cheapo ramdac components that make the display look like ass in higher resolutions.

Re:Crap review

[Col. Bloodnok]

Dude, have a look at Sun's older hardware, SS20 or even the Ultra1 for example, and you'll see what rock solid hardware is about.

Agreed. Nothing beats the SparcStations and the U1, U2, and the U60 for build quality. There's an internal picture in TFA which shows an IDE hard drive with a dangling ribbon cable for heavens sake! Even my SS5 has an SCA SCSI disk.

Still, can't be as bad as an U5 or a U10, those boxes made my crappy homebrew athlon machine look like a triumph of design engineering. They really cheapend the Sun workstation brand, but then Sun didn't actually make them...

Re:Crap review

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=22 55&p=4 You mean that picture which shows the SCSI hard drive? God forbid you or the GP read the article before commenting on the pictures in it.

Re:Crap review

[Col. Bloodnok]

I did actually read the article, not that it said what drives there were. I saw mention of a SCSI controller, but I also saw dual SATA controller and dual PATA controllers. The acticle never actaully *specifically* mentions which drives are used. In does imply SCSI though, I agree.

But since you ask, here's the systems handbook for the machine:

http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/W21 00 z/W2100z.html

Yes, indeed, They're 68 pin SCSI drives, connected via a ribbon cable to the HBA. Not 80 pin SCA2 drives - or FC drives, which I would expect in a machine of this price and indeed what we had on the U1, U2, U60 (with FC on the 1000. 1500, 2000).

I criticise because:

http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/W21 00 z/component.left.html

This is what you'd find in a PC, look at all those untidy loose cables. Sun workstations used to be beautifully put together.

Re:Crap review

[Anonymous Coward]

They may have not been designed by Sun, but if Sun add their logo and sells them, it's automaticaly their fault.

Cheaper than IBM? So what?

[BobaFett]

It's not IBM Sun has to compete against with these boxes. It's Dell. Dell sells the 64-bit workstations with Intel's Opteron clones, even with Linux preloaded, and beats Sun by at least 30%. It's even worse if you configure them with more RAM: Sun is so used to charging outrageous prices for their workstation RAM that they just can't turn on a dime. Dell wants about $1200 for the extra 4G of RAM (to bring the total to 8G), Sun at least twice as much.

It's good that Sun realized that they have to move to commodity hardware if they want to survive, now we're waiting for them to have an epiphany that commodity hardware sells at commodity prices.

Re:Cheaper than IBM? So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Sun is obviously not targeting the Linux market -- that's why JDS is based on Linux and Red Hat and SuSE are officially supported on thsis machine.

Summary - whitebox + linux as good and $3k cheaper

[Anonymous Coward]

Save $3000 and make your own dual Opteron server and throw a free copy of Suse 9.1 64 bit Linux on it and you'll have a machine with comparable or better performance than the sun workstation with Solaris, JDS Desktop or Linux.

Yes, the cheap opteron is louder and not as pretty, but there must be some zalman gimmicks out there somewhere that cost less than three grand!

Project janus does all that

[Anonymous Coward]

It runs linux apps side by side with solaris apps BETTER than they run on Linux natively. Using janus for the first time was great since I didn't have to fuck around with the mess/joke that is Linux in 2004.

You should try it. It is in the latest Solaris 10 beta.

A good place to start your liberation

Re:Summary - whitebox + linux as good and $3k chea

[codepunk]

actually build 3 opteron boxes and put on the mosix kernel and kick the hell out of any box.

but who spends US$8700 on a work station?

[sean.geek.nz]

Realistically, is there a significant market for work stations in that price range? If so, who and why?

I know there are some pretty intense users of 3D rendering out there. But they are a rather small and specialized market.

Maybe I'm just jealous, but isn't this a distraction for Sun from the real desktop market?

Sean

Re:but who spends US$8700 on a work station?

[ebooher]

Well, the tip top of the line is $8700.00, but they start out much cheaper than that.

w1100z

Opteron Model 144 (Single)

1 MB L2 Cache

Quadro NVS280 Graphics

512 MB RAM

80 GB HDD

GigE

5 USB, 2 1394, 2 Serial, 1 AGP 8x, 5 PCI-X

DVD-ROM/CD-RW

$1,495.00

Opteron Model 150 (Single)

1 MB L2 Cache

Quadro FX500 Graphics

1 GB RAM

80 GB HDD

GigE

5 USB, 2 1394, 2 Serial, 1 AGP 8x, 5 PCI-X

DVD-ROM/CD-RW

$2,095.00

w2100z

Opteron Model 246 (Dual)

1 MB L2 Cache

Quadro NVS280 Graphics

2 GB RAM

73 GB HDD (SCSI)

GigE

5 USB, 2 1394, 2 Serial, 1 AGP 8x, 5 PCI-X

DVD-ROM/CD-RW

$4,695.00

Opteron Model 250 (Dual)

1 MB L2 Cache

Quadro FX3000 Graphics

4 GB RAM

73 GB HDD (SCSI)

GigE

5 USB, 2 1394, 2 Serial, 1 AGP 8x, 5 PCI-X

DVD-ROM/CD-RW

$8,695.00

Good Idea?

[RAMMS EIN]

``Would you be surprised to hear Sun is the lowest cost Tier 1 dual-Opteron provider?''

I would be. But is this really a good idea? Sun hardware is generally regarded as well-engineered. Moving to x86 (ok, x86-64) and lowering the price might well shatter that image. And then, they can never go low enough...the white boxers will beat them to it.

Unless, of course, there is some middle ground and Sun can convince people that's where they're at.

Re:Their Xeon trade-in program is still going on t

[bhtooefr]

The HE and EE Opterons are the equivalent of the LV Xeons. One runs at about 35W (I forget which, though).

But of course!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Has Sun learned from the demise of SGI workstations that relying on one processor architecture is harmful?"

That's why the system is a dual processor architecture! :-)

Yeah, well there is the ongoing Hobbit thread...

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

I had my hopes up until the fifth and sixth words, when I realized that this wasn't a story by Tolkein.

ABC News is reporting that anthropologists have found the skeletal remains of seven hobbit sized hominids.

Remember the 386i, Suns first flirtation with x86?

[G4from128k]

This machine isn't Sun's first x86 machine. The 386i was an early attempt by Sun to use a cheap Intel processor to make a lower-price Unix machine. All of this was before Sun abandoned 3rd-party processors (Motorola and Intel) to concentrate on the SPARC architecture.

Re: The return of the Sun Workstation, With AMD's

[bhtooefr]

Basically, of the Big Three Opteron Providers (IBM, HP, and Sun), they're the cheapest for dual-CPU workstations.

Bzzzzt! YOU ARE WRONG

[kompiluj]

AMD processors differ utterly from Intel processors; AMDs from architectural standpoint resemble the Alpha and, in some aspects, the POWER architecture rather than Intel. The assembler opcodes are translated in early stage into internal opcodes.

PCI-e?

[Gentlewhisper]

Hmmm.. I noticed it doesn't seem to have PCI Express slots.

That kinda suck :(

Re:PCI-e?

[pedantic bore]

Well, it's got two PCI-X slots, which is as fast
as most available peripherals can go anyway.

Maybe you can't put your own super-duper graphics card in it but with built-in AGP 8x, gigabit ethernet, SCSI, and SATA, most people won't need
anything more.

Re:Summary - whitebox + linux as good and $3k chea

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell Sun you have the $6000 and you would like the $8500 Sun but the $5500 box offers same horsepower.
I bet Sun will gladly take your $6000...

Damn anand got me to click on the 'buy it for $1025' or whatever that LOW $ was that kept popping up. Fry's has better price if all you want's the CPU.

I almost bought a dual-Opteron Sun last week...

[NerveGas]

... but for the life of me, I couldn't find one with a redundant power supply. I imagine their 4-way machine probably has the option, but I didn't need four processers, just two.

steve

Re:I almost bought a dual-Opteron Sun last week...

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out the v40z. 2 and 4p options and dual power supply.

http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v40z/

It means that nobody has been buying SPARCs

[jbellis]

overpriced, underpowered, that sort of thing.

Commodity Chips Will Destroy Sun

[newsreporter]

The lesson from SGI is that workstations and servers based on commodity chips have extremely low margins. With such low margins, the only way to compete is to slash your company into a shell -- a screwdriver factory with almost no R&D budget. Dell is precisely such a factory.

In the case of IBM, it sells its hardware at a loss but recoups the loss by bundling hardware as part of a total systems solution that includes software and consulting services. Further, IBM hardware has no close competitor in terms of performance and reliability. Look at the Power5. It crushes the UltraSPARC III/IV in performance and is competitive in raw performance with Madison by Intel.

Sun has no chance to survive. Its software division and services divison are still a tiny percentage of the company's revenue. Also, more than 50% of Sun's workforce is former or current H-1B's.

By contrast, less than 5% of IBM's consulting division is H-1B's. American employees speak English well and understand American sensibilities, so when American companies outsource their information-technology operations, such companies almost always hand the operations over to HP or IBM.

Sun literally destroyed itself by botching the UltraSPARC III. Due to its inferior technology, Sun has had much trouble in selling highend servers, the bread and butter of Sun's operation. Sun was eventually forced to handover its highend server and processor development to Fujitsu.

Note that Fujitsu almost never hires foreign workers. Its native engineering workforce is almost exclusively Japanese citizens and designed a processor that outperforms Sun's own UltraSPARC, which was designed by a predominantly H-1B workforce. Fujitsu shutdown Hal Computers, the American subsidiary, because it was designing processors that performed even worse than the UltraSPARCs. Hal Computers was about 60% H-1Bs as well. After the native engineers at Fujitsu in Japan took over processor development, they designed a stunning processor.

Both the might of Korean engineering and Japanese engineering prove that H-1B engineers are unnecessary. In Korea, Korean companies almost never hire foreign engineers. Ditto for Japanese companies.

Sun got what it deserved. It cannot survive. Good riddance.

Re:Commodity Chips Will Destroy Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Check your facts. While the software division dig lag, Sun's service division has been the only thing keeping it afloat the last few years. Their hardware fell behind, but now that's all changing. I, for one, am optimistic about their chances of surviving, and maybe even thriving. They are embracing Linux and will open source Solaris, or so they promise. And is that a note of prejudice with the H1B comment?

Re:Their Xeon trade-in program is still going on t

[Jahf]

s/was\ so\ much/wasn\'t\ so\ much/

I want my ports NOW!!!

[thanasakis]

This puppy is actually (IMHO) a good deal for its money. I particularly liked the fact that it is quiet, which is a fact that has become very important in these days. If I am not wrong it will be able to run 3 operating systems (windows,linux,solaris) so there is a lot of choice without even counting FreeBSD. Speaking of which, I would like to make a plead to the Sun guys:

PLEASE give us a port collection similar to FreeBSD's on Solaris.

While compiling things still has meaning in a lot of situations where precompiled packages just don't fit, doing it on manual nowadays is a pain in the butt because of the complex interdependencies between various open source packages.
If you don't want to take my word for it,the NetBSD ports collection can be installed on solaris as well, so Sun would only have to assist in this effort without trying to reinvent the world from square one.

Am I getting through - or am I asking too much?

Re:I want my ports NOW!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you asking for a ports collection if you _know_ there's pkgsrc?

Re:I want my ports NOW!!!

[thanasakis]

No no, instead of writing a ports collection from scratch they could as well make a head start by contributing to pkgsrc. I am also not certain that pkg_install (netbsd) and pkginstall (solaris) use the same database (probably not). So they could modify it to use the regular pkgsrc.

Re:I want my ports NOW!!!

[buzz_mccool]

Do you want Sun's Solaris Software Companion CD? http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/freeware/s9do wnload.html "Welcome to Sun's Companion CD image download site for the Solaris 9 Operating System for x86 and SPARC platforms. This site enables users to download a CD (ISO) image of the Solaris Software Companion CD. Included are hundreds of Linux and other Open Source applications, tools, and commands built and packaged for the Solaris 9 Operating System (x86 and SPARC). The software is available in pre-compiled binary and source code format."

Re:I want my ports NOW!!!

[Mistah Blue]

Has anybody else noticed that SFWncurses does not install on Solaris 10b63 x86? It looks like it installs, but then you run a pkginfo SFWncurse and don't see anything. Go look at /var/sadm/pkg/SFWncurses and you will see a lock file there. Either this build isn't compatible with it, or the package is damaged. I've tried from the CD and downloading the tarball of the package from sufreeware.com.

Re:I want my ports NOW!!!

[Wolf Eyelash]

Try blastwave.org. What's nice is the package dependencies are figured out for you.

Re:I want my ports NOW!!!

[Wiz]

Nope, I want ports.

Whilst that CD is good - it doesn't exactly get updated. What happens when a vulnerablity in libpng appears? I don't think you'll see Sun giving you one!

And what if you want something a bit more obsecure and it isn't on the CD? What if you want something that has been updated in the meantime?

Re:I want my ports NOW!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you don't know about http://www.sunfreeware.com. They've been around for years.

SGI's demise...

[silverdr]

... really started when they turned off from single proc arch and started selling Windows machines, didn't it?

Re:SGI's demise...

[funnyguy]

Since when was SGI a single architecture? Granted they started off with MIPS, and did well. But yes, SGI *DID* sell x86 systems that supported both Linux and Windows OSes for several years. They still sell Linux systems Plus, MIPS ain't dead. I had a new Octane2 to mess with a couple years ago, its 350Mhz R12000 was pretty awesome and was very fast compared to 800-1Ghz x86 processors from back then. I guess the old saying "Don't knock it till you try it" applies well here. It's expensive hardware, and has a smaller user base than a lot of enterprise manufacturers, but still it is very nice stuff.

Re:SGI's demise...

[silverdr]

Yes. They started with MIPS and did well. Later on they did less well and even later on they desperately made the "Strategic Alliance with Microsoft" and tried to sell Windows PCs with SGI label. Until that time they were (AFAIR) pure MIPS ("single arch") and to this fact (I guess) the original post referred. To clear also out - I very much liked SGI products and still have some: Indigo, Indigo^2, Indy, Challenge...

SGI's demise

[deanj]

"Has Sun learned from the demise of SGI workstations that relying on one processor architecture is harmful?"

SGI took the big hit because they didn't see the PC graphics train barreling down the track, not because they were on a single processor architecture.

Re:SGI's demise

[solios]

Sort of. Basically, they invented 3d accelleration and put the fundamentals of modern graphics cards into silicon back when PCs were having trouble drawing more than 256 colors at once. Back when the SNES was sex on wheels.

Problem is that beyond what amount to minor improvements, they haven't done anything fundamentally NEW to evolve that technology in the last fifteen years.... so they've been lapped. My 2200$ 2000-era powerbook spanks the shit out of my 25000$ 1996-era Indigo2, and I didn't have to pay an extra ten grand for my graphics chipset to do texture mapping. :P

I still respect SGI for being 3d graphics pioneers. It's kind of depressing that they haven't been able to stay as far ahead of the game as they were in the eighties through mid nineties. The era when they were the only game in town.

Re:Remember the 386i, Suns first flirtation with x

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, I actually own one of those. Cool little box, but never really went anywhere. Another classic Sun move of releasing a product and then immediately switching directions and abandoning it.

Of course Sun has also had several other x86 machines if you count servers -- the v60 (and friends), the later non-MIPS Cobalt boxes, etc.

Re:Remember the 386i, Suns first flirtation with x

[photon317]

I used to have a copy of Sun's 386i UNIX software, which wasn't called SunOS or Solaris, and it came on a bunch of floppies :)

Re:Remember the 386i, Suns first flirtation with x

[photon317]

BTW - the v60x isn't Sun-designed. It's a generic platform that's designed and manufactured by Intel for rebranding (Combo M/B, Chassis, PS, Fans, etc..), and Sun sticks their peice of pastic on the front of it. If you dig around on Intel's site you can find the part numbers - at one point I even had to buy a special intel part number PCI riser card for a v60x to use a 5v PCI card in it, as Sun doesn't carry/rebrand some of those obscure parts. I would assume the v65x is the sme kind of story, but I haven't seen one in person.

Re:w2100z. w00t!

[Bitmanhome]

WE LOOZ? Very ominous.

I have one of these bad boys

[andy314159pi]

I got one of these Opteron/Sun machines and I installed SuSE linux on it without a problem. I only have the single processor version, but its the fast computer that I've ever used. Granted, I'm not doing any computation on it, but it works well for day to day stuff like paper writing and procrastination activities (web surfing and game playing.) I picked it up at their EBay sale for about $1140. There are a couple of programs that run in 32 bit on SuSE9.1 that won't run in 64 bits. Most notably is TEXMACS, which I use for paper writing.

Actually ......

[Anonymous Coward]

SGI started down hill when they sold the Cray server division to Sun for peanuts, who with fine marketing and service support was able to turn it into a 2.5 billion a year server biz.

Sun started down hill when they ignored the very engineers who delivered to them a 2.5 billion dollar server buisness and forced them to use Sun's tired old platform paradigm that barely kept them afloat for the previous 15 years.

A bit of Mac whoring from a price perspective...

[ikewillis]

Even in the enterprise and scientific community cost is still a consideration. I come from a scientific computing group that used to pay $20,000 for dual UltraSPARC-III Sun Blade workstations, then moved to Linux clusters, and is now moving to Apple clusters and Apple workstations. After being given a large discount by Apple, we found Apple's offer of cluster of 20 dual 2.0GHz G5 Xserves to be more powerful (and certainly less problematic) than Dell's offer of 20 3.2GHz Nocona Xeons. We found the new Intel Fortran Compiler 8.1 with EM64T support to be rather underwelming... its binaries optimized for the 64-bit Nocona Xeons with SSE3 couldn't outperform those made by Pathscale, the leading AMD64 compiler suite, on Intel's own processors (even though Pathscale only supports SSE2). However, neither could outperform IBM XL Fortran on the Xserve's 2.0GHz IBM PPC970FX processors with AltiVec units.

At less than an eighth of the price of a Sun workstation, you can purchase a dual 2.5GHz G5, which lacks many of the amenities of Sun Blades such as ECC RAM and 10,000RPM FC-AL hard drives, the model runs considerably faster at a fraction of the price, and the system can double as a user desktop with both Unix (i.e. scientific computing programs) and (otherwise) Windows amenities such as Microsoft Office and Adobe tools (Photoshop/Illustrator/Acrobat).

For any role I can imagine for a dual Opteron workstation, I can see a G5 in the same role for a considerably cheaper price. Furthermore, I can see a G5 outperforming an Opteron in any of those roles, because in virtually all of them (scientific computing, medical computing, multimedia/3D modelling/video production) the AltiVec unit on the G5 will be extremely beneficial, whereas Opteron has no good vector units for these purposes (Opteron SSE2 is slower than its FPU, SSE is only 64-bits, doesn't support double precision floating point or the multitude of operations AltiVec supports such as trig functions needed for FFT/DCT transforms)

I believe that next to the new Nocona Xeon-based Dell Precision workstations (with SSE3 which is comparable to AltiVec), Apple has the cheapest and most powerful Tier 1 workstation offering in the form of the dual 2.5GHz G5, at least for the roles a high end dual processor 64-bit workstation is intended to serve.

This needs to het modded "Funny"

[CaptainPinko]

I laughed really hard at that one! (Though I assume that when I actually visit the UK I won't be). Seiriously, that post definitely reminded me of Douglas Adams.

Pizza Box?

[chiph]

What's with the minitower? I thought Sun workstations were traditionally in the "pizza box" form factor.

Chip H.

Re:Pizza Box?

[Anonymous Coward]

The ultra 10 and the ultra 60, just to name a few, are tower cases. Yeah, older examples, I know, but towers just the same.

Also,

[quarkscat]

SGI management made some rather bad business
decisions (besides WinTel boxen). They
bought high and sold low on:
(1) MIPS processor fab,
(2) Cray Reasearch.
They followed up more "cost-cutting" with
the adoption of the Intel Itanium, which
sucked the spirit out of the company.

They managed to make some of the best
servers and workstations around, as well
as a unix (IRIX) that has a well integrated
GUI. The difference between sitting in front
of an SGI and a SUN workstation were like
day and night. SUN's move from CDE to
Gnome for their GUI has not been a huge
success.

SUN's adoption of the AMD Opteron processor
does offer some advantages for them -- but
only in the small (read "commodity") server
market. I am more excited about SUN's roll-out
of Solaris 10.

Lessons from SGI

[bob beta]

Has Sun learned from the demise of SGI workstations that relying on one processor architecture is harmful?

Hopefully what Sun learned from the demise of SGI is to never, ever, sell a line of hardware targeted to run Windows NT.

Which really isn't that valuable a lesson, cuz it's so obvious.

Wakeup People

[DanielJH]

WOW! So much for technical savvy tonight!

Unix is bleeding, it is unlikely that it will stop. Linux gains are coming primarily from Unix boxes, and Intel/AMD (basically the same thing in the big picture) is eating everyone for lunch. These are the facts, over and over again.

The big picture is that Unix systems traditionally had faster processors but slower performance growth curves. Intel/AMD had slower processors/faster growth curves. Some place around 2002 they crossed. Several firms (notably HP and SGI) saw this coming and made large efforts to move away from Unix systems. (HP developed, with Intel, the IA64) (SGI is back on top of Super computing peddling masive IA64/Linux systems.) HP has killed off two major Unix processor lines. SGI has put MIPS in maintenance, and Sun is not far behind. It is not that going Wintel has killed them, it was the only choice they had left.

The goal now for dedicated Unix vendors is to design, build and support wonderful Intel/AMD boxes with an operating system (probably Linux) and sell them to top tier companies at a premium because of the quality of the components and support. (Yes, Linux over Solaris. I can't prove it now, but Solaris going open source is probably so that they can inject Linux technology to update the OS.)

I welcome this change, it means cheaper computers with excellent service with machines that keep up with the el-cheep-o purchased for the secretary.

(BTW: SGI started down hill in 1997 when they decided that development wasn't important. Until last year they were selling the same graphics card! What was impressive is it took five years for anyone else to catch up. They also had top of the line Wintel machines, they just never upgraded the hardware or dropped the price. You could do that in the Unix world, not in Wintel.)

Yes, I work with all of these vendors. Yes, I develop the same applications on all of them. Yes, I have been following them for years. And yes, I have heard some of this from the companies themselves.

Re:Wakeup People

[Anonymous Coward]

You are spouting so much nonsense that I don't know where to start.
I have other work to do so I'll just summarize:
- Solaris 10 (need I say more?)
- Rock processor

Re:A bit of Mac whoring from a price perspective..

[bpbond]

A clarification (not a correction): the desktop G5 doesn't have ECC RAM, but the Xserve does.

Re:A bit of Mac whoring from a price perspective..

[bob beta]

At less than an eighth of the price of a Sun workstation, you can purchase a dual 2.5GHz G5, which lacks many of the amenities of Sun Blades such as ECC RAM and 10,000RPM FC-AL hard drives....

It also lacks the 'workstation' software that people buy Sun desktop boxes for.

Can you run Schematic capture/routing software on that Xserve? Can you run simulations of FPGAs? Is there any engineering software to speak of at all for the box?

I noticed above you said: ...in virtually all of them (scientific computing, medical computing, multimedia/3D modelling/video production) the AltiVec unit on the G5 will be...

Keyword: Will. When?

Death of an Open Source CPU

[r7]

The downside of this news is the failure of open-source hardware. Odd too that Linux and GPL advocates are _happy_ about being stuck with proprietary hardware. I guess it just goes to show that the open source movement isn't really about free as in "source" but about free as in "what's it going to cost me".

On the other hand Sun made a number of strategic mistakes in the manufacture and marketing (but not design) of the Sparc. Outsourcing 100% of the fabrication to Texas Instruments was mistake #1. Charging non-OEMs such large margins was mistake #2. Not pushing commodity form factors (like ATX and mini-ITX) was mistake #3. (I still have an IPX. Beautiful design. 15+ years ahead of it's time) Icing on the cake is Sun's insistence on wringing every dollar out of old/slow chips. Can you believe they are still selling 550MHz CPUs (in the Blade 150) in this day of 3K MHzs! Talk about dead-end.

r7

Re:Death of an Open Source CPU

[Jahf]

Show me an Open Source hardware platform that can be aquired for equal to or less than the cost of a commodity hardware platform with even 1/2 the performance.

The reason open source software succeeds so well is because of the low cost of entry as developer and the fact that the quality of open source software can match the quality of proprietary software. The case is not the same for hardware. You don't need a manufacturing facility or a the equivalent of an EE degree to get into engineering software, you only need a low cost PC or even access to a university lab.

A large part of the idea behind open source software is to commoditize the market so that everyone can afford to run high quality software. That goal has already been achieved in the hardware market (not saying that a $5,000 workstation counts there, but the fact that I can buy a -very- capable PC for $400 and the kind of performance that used to cost $50,000 maybe 5 years ago is now in the $5,000 range).

Another big factor in open source software is annoyance at companies like Microsoft and Bell that had traditionally kept people from knowing how to manipulate the proprietary software. CPU manufacturers like AMD and Intel have gone to great pains to make sure that the open source community had full access to the CPU architectures on the Opteron and the Itanium before it so that they ran Linux well.

Sure, there are things like 3D cards that are a big thorn in the side of open source coding, but you don't seem to be talking about them so much as CPU and chipset as a platform.

Re:Death of an Open Source CPU

[div_B]

and the kind of performance that used to cost $50,000 maybe 5 years ago is now in the $5,000 range).

Yes but Moore's law equates to a 10 fold increase in performance over 5 years, so that's not at all surprising. (Cue lots of replies informing me that, strictly, Moore was referring to processor complexity not performance....)

Re:Summary - whitebox + linux as good and $3k chea

[bob beta]

When most people think 'Sun Workstation' they aren't thinking 'run some benchmarks.'

why are 64 bit benchmarks slower in some cases?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it because 64bit pointers are twice the size and take up more room in the L1/L2/L3 caches instead of useful data, so there are more cache misses; and longer to read from memory? And likewise for ram and swap?

no no no no no

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't anybody say the $600 credit is will almost cover the $699 SCO charge! It's not funny anymore!

Elegant sun hardware

[Nonesuch]

Obsolyte has a great archive of Sun hardware pictures.

http://www.obsolyte.com/sunPICS/ The SparcStation 20 is my favorite example, though several later products (in particular, the E450) exhibit similar design sensibilities.

The difference between Sun and SGI...

[solios]

... is that Solaris runs on x86. You get some bang for your buck, as it were, and you have a reason to buy a Sun x86 box if you're in the market for UNIX on the cheap. Yeah, you can install Windows on it, but it runs other things and more importantly, you buy it from Sun and it comes with Solaris.

The SGI x86 boxes ran Windows, not IRIX. Their machines were Just Another Workstation/Server, running NT. Complete with assgasmic upgrade capabilities and RAM prices somewhere up in low earth orbit.

If you needed a PC workstation or a PC server, you could get one cheaper than the SGI equivalent from almost anybody. They lacked an OS to leverage, they lacked upgradeability, and they were generally more of a pain in the ass than any PC of similar horsepower, thanks to a wacked out SGI bootloader that won't take modern versions of Windows.

Best as I can tell, SGI (post ReBranding) completely lost sight of why anyone bought their gear to begin with. They've lost the consumer-visible High End Graphics market to commodity technology... and High End Graphics hasn't (in my experience) been a Sun Thing.

Re:A bit of Mac whoring from a price perspective..

[Too Much Noise]

At less than an eighth of the price of a Sun workstation, you can purchase a dual 2.5GHz G5

$8,695.00 for this dual Opteron Sun w2100z. Please, point me to this amazing deal that gives you dual 2.5GHz G5's for about $1000. And with comparable specs would be nice - like 4G ECC RAM, Quadro-class video and so on.

For any role I can imagine for a dual Opteron workstation, I can see a G5 in the same role for a considerably cheaper price.

Yeah, you're trolling, I know. But here's a question: do you know what the (listed for the Sun w2100z) GeForce Quadro FX3000 is used for? Did you ever see a G5-powered station used for the same purpose? (hint: look at the video cards Apple puts in the top-of-the-line G5)

Opteron SSE2 is slower than its FPU, SSE is only 64-bits, doesn't support double precision floating point ...

Dude, lay off the crack! Really, now, why do I even bother? You obviously think x86 is still back in the PentiumPro era or something like that. Get your 'facts' straight.

The sad thing is, you could have actually made a point here. AltiVec is definitely better implemented than SSE2/3 ... if only AMD would wake up to doing to SIMD the same parallelization they pulled with FPU on Athlons! I have little hope in Intel for that, as they have Itanium in mind as the FPU racehorse.

It is and it isn't.

[solios]

We run a Mac shop, but we use PCs running linux on the server end.

Why?

Simple.

Dollar for dollar, for what we need and use the server for, the linux solution (while unsupported- debian running a couple of nice phat SATA RAIDs) is orders of magnitude cheaper. We're talking a terabtye of storage with the machine to run it for well under two grand.

We didn't need any of the fancy schmancy "features" of OS X Server, and everyone in the division lost interest in the XServe when they saw the price tag.

When you can get double the capabilities and/or capacity for the same price as a single solution, suddenly cost is a consideration- especially if you need, say... new monitors and RAM upgrades.

Yeah, Organizations can afford to buy Real Computers, but that doesn't mean Organizations can afford to waste money. :P

Close...

[solios]

SGI took a nosedive the second they rebranded. They started shipping x86 machines about five seconds after that, for all of about twenty minutes.

When they ditched the cube for that stupidass g, that was it. :|

Sun DOES sell Xeon and...

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as AMD and Intel chips:
Sun offer Xeon in their V60x and V65x (dual CPU) servers as well as their B200x (dual Xeon) blade.
That also affer and Athlon-based blade B100x

Their V20z (2-way) and V40z (4-way) servers use Opteron and an 8-way Opteron system is rumoured to be in the works, as well as Opteron blades.

The REALLY interesting SPARC-based chips will make it into Sun servers in 2006. The dual-core fujitsu Sparc64 VI with 6MB of cache will power the high-end servers (e.g. 72 CPU dual core machines), and the 8-core Niagra (SPARC) chips will be used in the entry level servers (8 CPUs or less).

In 2008 the multi-core "Rock" (SPARC) processor currently being developed by Sun will be released which aparrently "borders on science fiction".

What is a workstation?

[Elivs]

A saying I'm sure most of you have heard:

Trains stop at a train stations.
Buses stop at bus stations.

- So what happens at a workstation?

Elivs

You are wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

> I can't prove it now, but Solaris going open >source is probably so that they can inject Linux >technology to update the OS.

I am afraid the injecting will be happening in the opposite direction. Solaris 10 is quite simply better, faster and cheaper than Linux. Linux has no ZFS, DTrace, N1 Grid etc. etc.

Same motherboard in IBM A-Pro ...

[Kango_V]

The K85AE motherboard in the Sun Workstation is the same one IBM uses in the Intellistation A-Pro. Strange Sun didn't design their own? Or is it the other way around?

Same as IBM 325 ???

[tchiwam]

I know this is a little late but after looking at pictures in this article, I find it interesting to see (IMO) and identical motherboard than in My IBM 325...

Whither SGI, was Re:I dunno

[couch_warrior]

As I understand it, what torpedoed SGI is that they pissed off their best graphics design engineers, so several of them quit and founded NVidia, and applied the SGI graphics pipeline processes to cheap PCI and AGP graphics cards... thereby making is possible to get $40K OnyxII class graphics performance on a $1K PC. Nobody I've ever met bought an SGI workstation because they loved the MIPS CPU...

Re:Their Xeon trade-in program is still going on t

[kaiwai]

Why even use Xeon? Please, I am trying to hear *ONE* valid reason for not using AMD64 for either a server or workstation. All I have heard as an excuse so far is the "Intel Factor". If you want to pay more simply for the "intel factor" then good for you, but don't expect a parade os sheeple to follow.

Re:A bit of Mac whoring from a price perspective..

[kaiwai]

Regarding the compiler factor, one must remember that SUN is going to release a AMD64 version of their compiler. If it is anything like their UltraSPARC compiler, I will be a very happy camper.

Re:A bit of Mac whoring from a price perspective..

[Anonymous Coward]

Keyword: Will. When?

Idiot: he means that when you compare them, that's what you will find. Douchebag.

Re:A bit of Mac whoring from a price perspective..

[jschottm]

For any role I can imagine for a dual Opteron workstation, I can see a G5 in the same role for a considerably cheaper price.

Really? 6 months ago I paid ~$2800 for my dual Opteron that's my monster file server. The closest I could get on the Apple Store came to $5,950. Except...

The G5 only supports 8GB of RAM (think RAM cache for files whose average size is 300MB) rather than the 16 that my Opteron can handle. (It's currently at 2GB, but will be boosted shortly.)

The G5 has bigger and better OS drives than the Opteron, but I don't care. I'll never use more than a few gigs on the system drives.

The G5 DVD option also burns CDs. Big whoop.

To stay up to date with OS updates, a 3 year OS X Server plan is $1,000. With Linux I have any number of options that start at "free."

My Opteron has a better support plan - next day/overnight replacement policy.

On top of all of that, the Opteron integrates perfectly with my KVM system which I don't have the option of replacing.

So tell me again why I'm supposed to spend twice as much? The G5 may or may not be faster than the low end Opterons. I could care less about processor speed - I'll saturate my network connections with the files long before processor power becomes a bottleneck. The reason I went with Opterons is to have the ability to address very large RAM sizes.

Re:A bit of Mac whoring from a price perspective..

[bob beta]

I was just clarifying and extending the discussion. Little of that kind of software exists for the Mac, which is largely a 'peronal Desktop' machine. Not a scientific/technical machine.

Why the name calling?