Slashdot Mirror
64-bit Solaris Tests Successful
mulan writes "Following a successful email sent from a Solaris64 box, Sun announced today that the Solaris Operating Environment is running on engineering prototype systems based on Intel's Itanium processor. The press release is on line, while meatier details, white papers and documentation are available at the Solaris64 developer center. "
I don't doubt that, Bruce, but I seriously doubt you got a Xeon with 2MB cache. I'm seeing $3680 as the minimum price on the net.
This presumes that there will be "Sun IA-64 stuff", rather than just Sun SPARC hardware. That isn't necessarily going to be the case.
Having tried a SPARC based personal workstation a while ago, I can only say that this is good news for Sun. Their systems may deliver nice I/O throughput, but their processors seem to be outclassed by Intel, especially so when taking into account the price tag of SPARC hardware.
...
I think Sun has 2 problems: Linux, which from a free download gives you a much more polished software install than the factory pre-installed Suns have (and which is certainly good enough unless you're doing realy high-end stuff) and of course the ix86 chips. Intel and AMD might not be there for the really high-end market yet, but for the workstation market they are dirt cheap at similar (or in my case even better) performance than Sun could provide for twice (or even more) the price. Sun's success is increasingly mysterious to me
But IA-32 instructions, as the "32" suggests, don't support a 64-bit flat address space, so, to run Solaris 7 on IA-64, Sun has to treat Tterbium or Otassium or whatever the heck it's called as an IA-64 processor; the fact that it runs IA-32 instructions doesn't help (unless you boot Solaris x86 on it, but all that would demonstrate is "yup, Adium's IA-32 mode works").
The address-space limitations may require a 64-bit processor, but the file size limitations don't, as long as you're not mapping the entire file into your address space - plenty of OSes running on 32-bit processors allow files bigger than 4GB.
If by "double precision" you mean "64-bit floating-point numbers", with the exponent+mantissa+sign taking 64 bits total, what current 32-bit processors don't support 64 or more bits of floating-point number in hardware (and/or don't run software that supports them as well)?
Integer arithmetic instructions that handle at most 32 bits at a time, and 32-bit pointers, don't limit file sizes to 32 bits (one can synthesize 64-bit or bigger arithmetic operations from the integer arithmetic instructions - and most C compilers, these days, will do it for you, and compilers for other languages may do the same); they only limit how big a file you can map into your address space all at once.
They also don't limit the width of floating-point numbers.
The key limitation of 32-bit processors is the address space limitation you noted; that one is a bit more of a pain to work around (e.g., by mapping stuff into and out of your address space manually).
64-bit, or 64-bit with some 128-bit instructions. The Emotion Engine is, according to a Microprocessor Report article, a processor that implements the MIPS III instruction set plus some MIPS IV stuff, with some additional vector and MPEG-2 decoding support added. The operand bus for the vector stuff is 128 bits, but that's not enough to make it a full-blown 128-bit processor (any more than the SIMD stuff in MMX/SSE, or AltiVec, or..., make processors that implement those wider everywhere).
Someone taking my name in vain ? Thats certainly
not my quotes
Solaris scales to 64CPUs (partly because of their
kickass memory bus on the ultrasparc). We beat them flat low end but believe me, for a lot of
things on 8+ cpus it has us hammered. On 32+ cpus
Id be willing to bet it wins aginst 2.4 once we
have it finshed
I wouldnt buy a Xeon for most things either. A
quad Xeon costs the same as a rack of 2U celeron
boxes and ethernet switch. 20 celerons versus 4
xeons, 20 celerons with a total of about 8 times
the memory bandwidth of the xeon box
Dear me. Believing a slashdot poster. Want to buy
a bridge, or some dehydrated water ?
Solaris Ultrasparc SMP is very good.
Thats a real quote from me.
Proof that not only MS creates FUD...
/etc/inetd.conf gets commented out. And not starting daemons you don't need helps too.
1. I think you got the two Oses reversed here, as Solaris scales to 64 processors I believe. Anyway, show me where Alan Cox says this.
2. Say it with me, folks:
THE OS IS AS SECURE AS THE ADMINISTRATOR IS COMPETENT!
NO sane administrator would use anything (except perhaps OpenBSD) out of the box. At the very minimum most of
3. The focus shouldn't be "is it Open Source?", but rather "is it the best program that I can use now to fit my needs?"
Linux is a nice system for the "average" PC. But the BSDs are probably best for Web servers, and Solaris is probably best if you need a huge file server or database machine.
Solaris is definitely the wrong choice for home PCs, which have no SCSI and 1 processor, but it's not intended for that. Linux is.
4. The actual situation is more like this: Once the server machine gets big enough to warrant using Solaris on it, the price of the OS is a small fraction of the price of the entire system. And yes, for those machines (4 processors or more) Solaris may perform better (gasp!) than Linux.
5. I must be part of a different revolution than you. My revolution is against Microsoft. My revolution does not say, "Use GNU/Linux OR DIE!!!" My revolution says, "There is more to life than Microsoft products. There are better ways to compute. It's up to you to use the best product for you. It's just that we think you can do better than Microsoft products and would encourage you to research the alternatives."
Open Source is nice, but you have to figure a lot of people just won't _care_ whether they get source code or not, as long as the program works properly.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei