15 Oct
2008
15 Oct
'08
7:48 p.m.
On Oct 15, 2008, at 5:58 PM, David Griffith wrote:
It seems that Sun has discontinued (hopefully
temporarily) desktop
Sparc
machines. Can someone tell me how the prices of these machines
compared
with their line of x86 machines?
I was left with the impression that the Sparc machines were
underperforming compared to what is possible using Xeon (or even
Phenom) processors and standard PC chipsets, which is part of the
reason why Sun is sunsetting the machines.. especially in the
workstation-class machines. I'm sure the fact that Apple is hitting
that segment hard with a dual-Quad Xeon (3.2GHz) chip based machine
for under $5k doesn't help. Add to the fact that $5k workstation will
do Windows as well as UNIX-flavor-of-the-decade at bare metal speed,
and I'm sure Sun has seen their workstation business mosey right into
Cupertino's sunset.
Have you seen what a $200 AMD Phenom motherboard/CPU combo is today at
your local computer chop shop? A quad-core 2.5 GHz processor, for
crying out loud. That'll fluff up your World Community Grid
statistics a wee.
Sun is realizing what Apple figured out about 5 years ago: love it or
hate it, x86 is here to stay and the war between AMD and Intel is only
a "good thing" for you as a computer maker interested in the highest
performance.
You've never seen TOPS-20 move quite as fast as it does running in a
[sim|em]ulator on a 64-bit Athlon machine running Linux. It isn't
even capable of making the machine break a sweat on a quad-core Phenom.
Haven't checked lately, but last I saw there was only one SPARC-based
machine still on the TOP500, nowhere near the top. Sun's entry on the
Top 10 is running Opteron, for crying out loud.