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

Posted by timothy on Wednesday October 27, 2004 @09:01AM 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."

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Re:As I remember... by Waffle+Iron · 2004-10-27 09:53 · 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.