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

Posted by timothy on from the not-black-hole-sun dept.

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."

4 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. As I remember... by NoMoreNicksLeft · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:As I remember... by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

  2. Cheaper than IBM? So what? by BobaFett · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:What would really be surprising by upsidedown_duck · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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