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Ultra Cheap Ultras From Sun
madHomer writes "I just read that Sun is going to be selling some Ultra 5's for less then $2,000. They did not include specs in the press release. I am very curious what the "base" model is. They say they are not going after the home market, but the developer market. "
Well guess what? If I want to upgrade anything, I still have to buy components from Sun. The memory is somehow
If I hadn't been able to get the machine very cheap (we had them on lease to another company who nearly paid off the purchase price before the lease went off) I wouldn't have bought it at all.
With the press release saying these new machines will run "Windows NT, Windows 95, DOS" I wonder if they've even given up putting a SPARC chip in these things and gone Intel-based clone. If they have, I'll bet you'll still need to get components from Sun. I suspect it's just a braino from the people who did up the press release, though.
Also, the statement that this is "the first Unix workstation to be listed under $2,000" will probably upset the VA Research and Penguin Computing guys.
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
The base model I believe is a 333mhz without a cache and a 5400 RPM IDE disk with 64 megs of RAM. These machines include a PCI bus with 3 slots and Two IDE controllers. I don't believe you can add IDE devices to these machines. The next step up machine comes with a 9gig 7200 RPM disk, a 2megabyte l2 cache and 128 megs of ram.
To clarify, these machines will only run Windows using a Sun PC card or using software emulation like RealPC. To run RealPC, you have to put the framebuffer in 8 bit mode (24 bit mode is not supported)
I own one of these machines and I like it a lot. It has been running constantly for 8 months. It has only been off once in that time, when I moved. I don't know specifcs about the power supply, but I don't believe they are too expensive.
This is NOT a server machine, and you probably don't want to use it as one. It is a desktop and is not very expandable unless you use external SCSI devices. You can get a symbios 5c375 SCSI adapter (not the Tekram one) to work with it using the glm driver. The scsi costs abou $60. The framebuffer is an ATI framebuffer that is not teribly fast, but more than sufficient for coding.
These machines have been available to certain educational institutions at this price for a while now. I use mine as my main desktop machine and it has been running great. It even runs Oracle 8 and does the printserving and NFS serving for my house.
Mike Mangino
mmangino@acm.org
Remember, there has always been something of a traditition of sharing code and enhancements in the UNIX community -- even before GNU and Linux.
One of the reasons that Linux took off was that it ran on the cheap PC hardware ( read 386 ), similar which many people had around at home. Unix needed something a little more at the time.
Sun want to get into that home hobby market where Linux started ( and still remains to a reasonable extent ) and to do that, they need to have boxes in bedrooms.
And they'd better be cheap enough to afford.
I've found their hardware to be very reliable, and I would quite happily run Linux on it, though I'm sure they would like the home hobby people to be writing for Solaris on it.
I suspect that there will be problems though. High quality hardware costs more than lower quality stuff. Given the choice between a very reliable $2000 Ultra, or a $600 PC, to run linux, in your bedroom, for hacking on, what do you choose. One is 99% reliable hardware, the other 99.9%. Is that little bit worth paying $1400 for?
Sun could reduce the spec more, and maybe reduce the price, but can they afford to lose the reputation for hardware reliablilty that they have to do this? Even if the E4000s remain rock solid?
They are also hampered more by the SCSL, which has gotten panned as a not quite open source license -- a "You get the source, but we get anything you code" type of thing. Changing the SCSL to make it conform to the Open Source definition, so that the community will like it may well be a bigger step that they need to make.
They damage may already be done here though? Has anyone been developing for Darwin?
I started pricing an Ultra 5 system on their "online buying" system, and as soon as I added the base-model CPU to the base system, this brought the price from $2550 to about $3700.
And this didn't actually include a monitor...
I would be vastly more interested to hear that someone was offering inexpensive ( e.g. - priced under $500) motherboards.
Net Express offers SPARC mobos for as "little" as $1510.
Cycle CC and Opus SPARCard represent possible alternatives, but when they don't publicize pricing, that usually suggests that you don't want to know...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
The machine itself is damned fast but the GUI isn't as excellerated as much as Windows or new XFree servers. Do some 3D rendering on it and then try it on an Ultra5 or something and you'll see a hell of a difference. Sun needs to work on their interface for their workstations but the backend (the Solaris kernel) is damn fast and pretty efficient.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
A lot of the comments posted here so far seem to approach this announcement as though Sun were attempting to break into the home computer market. I don't think that's what they're attempting to do. The article says they're aiming it at software developers - few "at-home" developers are going to want one; as people have pointed out, they're too expensive, they're not powerful enough... the list goes on.
Look at it from another point of view: That of a group of developers in a company. I think Sun are aiming this at a company who'll be bulk-buying workstations for a department or project. If a company is going to equip its developers with Unix workstations, it's not going to care about quality sound, or high performance graphics, or the fact it's got IDE disks instead of SCSI - the company will care about cost per unit, and the answer to the question "Will it run ${development editor of company choice} ?".
I'm a developer at a place that uses Sun stuff for the vast majority of its servers, and a fair proportion of the infrastructure software is written in-house. We also have Ultra 5 workstations for the developers. Yes, they're slow. What does it matter when you have a server to develop against? If you're writing large applications, you're going to have a development server, if you're not, then you don't need that spectacular a machine. Personally, I end up using the Ultra 5 for running a few dozen xterms, a mail client, a newsreader, and netscape, and as long as I'm careful with the number of netscape windows open, it's fine. Would I be justified in expecting more from a corporate desktop machine?
If I needed high quality graphics, then why get an Ultra 5 in the first place? Get an Ultra 60, or an SGI. If I wanted a truly powerful development server, then you pay the money for it. Most large companies can afford to do this - and IME most smaller companies wouldn't want to.
That's not what the Ultra 5 is for, and that's not what I believe this move is aimed at.
S.
If you're going to spend $1500-3000 for a Sun, go buy a sparcstation 20. They have a nice all-ultrawide scsi (SCA) disk subsystem, sbus and mbus expansion slots, and are well-built quality machines. They aren't that fast cpu-wise (unless you get the faster ROSS dual hypersparc modules in which case they'll give today's fastest intel chips a run for their money), but they'll last forever and perform well. They run Linux especially well if that's what you're after, and you can get sx or zx graphics (24-bit color, 3d acceleration) if you want it. I'd gladly pay twice the cost of an ultra 5 for one of these "obsolete" machines. These and the Ultra 1/2 are the last good desktop machines Sun made with the possible exception of the Ultra 60 ($30-50k), but the 1's and 2's are still quite expensive. The Ultra 5 is garbage; not worth $1000 IMHO.
Btw, for running Windows and other 'PC' stuff, you get Sun's PCi-card, which has an AMD K6-2 on it.
The article were simply pointing out that Sun is offering this low-end unix workstation at, wait for it, the market for low-end workstations. Sun never target any of their computers at the home market!
Also, why assume Sun are targeting Linux with this? Is that the only possible reason Sun could have for reducing the price!? Come on! PC prices, for the same specs, drop all the time, and Sun just move a bit less frequently.
Interesting. Why do you say Linux support is better on the Alpha? The UltraSPARC is very well supported by Linux, and probably has the best SMP support of any Linux platform. Linux installs out of the box on both systems (Red Hat is available for both, and Debian support is either there or coming very soon).
As for the Alpha being a better processor than the UltraSPARC, that's debatable, particularly when talking about the UltraSPARC III. That said, the Alpha is almost certainly better than the CPU in an Ultra 5 (which is one of the older UltraSPARCs).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Uhm... the only valid complaint from reading your message is that the Ultra 5 doesn't have SCSI.
I used an older Ultra 5 for two years - it was fast, the sound was very respectable and the video was great (though 8 bit because of its age).
The only problem I had was the IDE subsystem is slow as balls, just like all IDE systems. But I just put in a PIII-550 on my desk with similar setup, albeith SCSI-Ultra drives and it isn't much faster under Linux OR Solaris 7 than the old Ultra 5 I had was. At compiling because of the RISC nature of the system, but not much else. The compiling speed is a big boon to me - the rest isn't much different than the U5.
Either you're exaggerating or you've got a bone to pick with Sun, maybe... dunno.
...Steve
I don't see it as us against them. What I do see is that Sun is capaigning for the hearts and minds of Linux developers. Is that nessecarily a bad thing? Not really. Does it have the potential? I think so. I think that Sun wants to be detrimental to the Linux community without raising its ire. Maybe that's just conjecture on my part, but I see trends that I'm not ignoring. If you think I'm paranoid, so be it, but I think I'm being less paranoid than the most strident supporters of encryption. Sun has said a few bad things about Linux publicly, and if you don't see Linux as a competitor to Sun, it doesn't mean that they don't. They've communicated, in fact, that Linux is too "low end" to compete, but don't they have "low end" solutions too? All I'm saying is: watch them. They have the potential to be dangerous.
Is this thing a 64-bit Sparc?
If so, it might be worth it for some folks, just for development and testing of 64-bit Sparc ports. You don't need speed for this -- that's why I'm happy with my Multia even though it's a snail when compared to other Alphas.
If I have to spend $10k to support 64-bit Sparc, I won't. If I only have to spend $2k, I might.
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
The biggest thing SPARC-based systems have going for them in my mind is that they run a good version of Java on a UNIX platform. The other really good implementation of Java is for NT.
Java on other UNIX platforms (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) is either not the latest version (only up to 1.1) or still not entirely reliable (1.2 on Linux, etc.).
It's not logic. It's corporate thinking. Even if it's not a zero sum game for us, it is for them. All proprietary companies have the us vs. them mentality. Sun is not a friend of Linux and want to imitate our developement community. When you live in a world of market share, Linux developers are a commodity and they want them. Don't think that Sun's not interested in Linux developers switching sides. They'd love for some people to defect completely and cut themselves off at the knee.
[my sparc machine hopping story...]
:-) While the processor is noticablly slower, it's constantly active while building and not hindered by the disk I/O susbsystem(s) (fast-wide SCSI) PLUS, it's got enough memory to avoid agressive swapping.
I work for a company who makes network modeling software (the specifics are not important.) As such, I spend alot of time compiling and testing out what the developers are writing.
When I started here, I inherited a 170MHz Sparc5 with 192M of RAM. It made a fair X-Terminal, but was way way to slow to compile the product and was painfully slow to run the product -- I'd classify the speed as "usable" (barely.) The memory eventually was upped to almost 500M which helped some, but 170MHz turboSparc processor just ain't got the juice to do much.
It was replaced with a 167MHz Ultra 1 with 128M (and a bitchin' high speed Creator 3D gfx card.) I saw very little improvement. I was actually slower at compiling due to the lack of memory. When the memory was upped to 256M, things were better. It's still not the speediest creature in the office (or my apartment for that matter.) BUT, it was a vast improvement over the sparc5.
As I'm one to always ask for (well, alright, demand) faster and faster toys, the ultra 1 was replaced with a 300MHz Ultra10 (192M). While the processor was twice as fast, the lack of memory and the complete thumb-twidling halt every time the IDE disks where accessed just killed that machine. I suppose, given 384M or more of memory would help. However, the slowness of the IDE system prompted a "give me more memory or return the ultra 1."
The Ultra 1 returned with "mem = 458752K (0x1c000000)"
We ALSO have a fully loaded Ultra60... two 450MHz UltraIIi processors, 2GB of RAM, and two high speed SCSI drives. That machine "just fsckin' screams." (I don't want to see it's price-tag.)
Conclusion... unless you start a compile and leave (or otherwise stop working when you compile), IDE based Ultra's are not the tools one should use for software development. If all you're doing is writing code (or Java) and not building on IDE drive(s), then these things are ok. If you're serious about developing Sparc applications, then spend the money for SCSI based hardware. Oh and tell Sun to burn that worthless PCi card -- it gives you nothing you cannot get in a 300$ PC that doesn't leach resources from the rest of the system.
Although the Ultra 5's are fairly nice for Unix workstations. Not as nice as, say, the Ultra 1 or Ultra 2, since they use a cheaper processor and are IDE (vs SCSI which is fine for a workstation), but still very decent.
More specs are here and here.
jf
I can see this as an excellent test box for software and generally a cool workstation. My SparcStation 20 is treating me well, but I would consider an Ultra 5 to be worth the money to upgrade.
Right now there is no word about a discout for educational use, but you can expect an announcement to come soon about that. The last educational price was around $1,800, so this should drop considerably.
Solaris Central will posting new information as it comes up about the price drop.
Duane
-- Solaris Central - http://w
More details are available in this other article.
Apparently, the Win95, NT and DOS reference is to a Ultra5 with a SunPCi card.
...is an Ultra5 worth it. I'm writing this on an Ultra5. Probably one of the $2,000 ones. It's got a 4.3G IDE disk and a 12x IDE CD-ROM. It has a 10/100 'Happy Meal' ethernet card. Onboard sound that is horrendous. No SCSI capabilities without a very specific SCSI card. One serial port that requires a special splitter cable.
With 256M of memory, this Ultra5 is actually *slower* than my IBM ThinkPad 860 running AIX with a 603/166MHz and 64M in it. That's right; it's actually slower. It's running a cheapo Raptor 4M 'framebuffer' which is actually a Permedia2a, specifically, a FireGL 1000 Pro OEM'd twice; once by Diamond, once by this other company.
I can honestly say I have a framerate using Netscape. I have a framerate when I'm typing because the keyboard controller is having difficulties keeping up with my typing (I type at ~110WPM w/78% accuracy) and the movements of my mouse. And this is with 256M, which probably puts it up to the $5,000 mark if you want your memory from Sun.
Honestly, I can't say I've been on a much worse machine. Even my PCs are better than this; at least they have the ability to use a variety of SCSI cards and sound cards; here, you're stuck with one choice and no options. The CD-ROM is problematic, as is the OS. Half the time it refuses to take an audio CD, much less play it.
Don't waste your money. I can honestly say that the DEC Multia is on par with the Ultra5 as far as a development machine; and I own 3 DEC Multias. They have the same problems - no room for disk, proprietary floppy, etc. The difference is that the Multia comes with video onboard, and has IDE and SCSI in it, as well as a decent sound card, NIC, PCMCIA, and you can add expansion capabilities. The Ultra5.. well.. I think I need another Motorola MTX+ '011 before I so much as want an Ultra5. If you must have SPARC, go get a SPARCengine UltraAXi from one of the many VAR/OEMs that Sun rips off royally. Same machine, only you can actually try and work with it.
-RISCy Business | Rabid unix guy, networking guru
your company here.
shelby != ford
See here.
Huh? Does something prevent you from buying one of these and installing your favorite Linux distribution on it? Is there fine print requiring the use of Solaris?
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!