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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."
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?
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
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.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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?
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
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
Yes I would be surprised, and I don't even know what that is! Wow!
vicious, untreated political sewage...niche entertainment for the spiritually unattractive...worshipless pap
actually build 3 opteron boxes and put on the mosix kernel and kick the hell out of any box.
Got Code?
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
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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.
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?
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.
/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.
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
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.
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.