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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."
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?
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.
See what I've been reading.
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.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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.
Since this box is neither Windows nor Intel just wtf are you agreeing with?
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).
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
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.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
Because your desktop would be a slow, bloated piece of cr*p, where each simple application would consume about 80MB??
At less than an eighth of the price of a Sun workstation, you can purchase a dual 2.5GHz G5
...
... 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.
$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
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.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.