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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."
Since the article doesn't link it
http://wwws.sun.com/software/javadesktopsystem/
The lesson I'd learn from SGI is that jumping into the WinTel server market is harmful.
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,
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?
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."
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.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Every time I see w2100z, my internal 1337-sp34k decoder kicks on. Then I realize it's the actual product name.
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.
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.
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.