15 Oct
2008
15 Oct
'08
8:12 p.m.
On Wed, 15 Oct 2008, C. Sullivan wrote:
On Oct 15, 2008, at 5:58 PM, David Griffith wrote:
PC Club closed shop here. CompUSA has been gone for a year. PCXGEN has
mutated into a cybercafe with no meaningful hardware sales to speak of.
That seems to leave Best Buy way on the other end of town past the
molasses-like crawl that's known as Rosedale Highway.
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.
At least I'd like to see them do something with the BIOS replacements like
Coreboot.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
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