David Miller said: > Like wow, why didn't you. I'd never waste my own hard earned money on > Sun hardware...
Ah, but the Sun Blades look so cool!!! :) More seriously, Sun's server prices have become far more competitive, and now that the prices are similar I would much rather have an 8 processor V880 than an 8 processor Intel box. Same applies to servers that need more than 4Gb of RAM. I do think that a lot of the "coolness" factor of Sun systems is related to their mystique and their relative rarity. Very much like Apple hardware. I support Sun because it I fear a hardware monoculture as much as I worry about the existing Windows software monoculture. And I do believe their hardware performs better in the data center, but this is normally not very exciting stuff. (Solaris is also not a bad operating system. Although it does not make a very nice _desktop_ OS.) > That's the facts of the market today, everthing is commoditized > to the tilt. Although commodity components also suffer from the lowest-common-denominator effect. The performance of Intel servers suffer because it is much harder for the vendors to build tightly integrated backplanes and systems. And reliability can suffer too. Which is pretty much proven by the fact that Sun have started using even more commodity hardware in their systems and their reliability does seem to have suffered. (ref: the Broadcom recall, for example.) > the only reason I have so many boxes is that I've gotten > them all for free during my years of development. Aw, can I have some. Please?!? <tries best doe eyed look> (Well, you can't blame me for trying. :) > Look, do the math, the cheapest lowest end Athlons you can even buy on > the market today are in the 1.2GHZ range (and these are for laptops). > This means that even if your 600Mhz UltraSPARC-III could execute twice > as many instructions per cycle as the Athlon (btw it can't), they > would perform about the same. And you can get good graphics cards for very little extra on the Athlon. > My 2-processor sb1000 is fast enough for my work, all I do is edit > code and crank out kernel builds all day long. And my 700MHz Intel laptop does most of what I need. (Except that the &%*% Broadcom based wireless adapter is not supported under Linux.) Although if I was doing mathematically intensive stuff like I used to do at University, then I think I would care about faster processors. (I learnt to use Unix by writing mathematical models in C on the Silicon Graphics belonging to a completely different department. I could then solve a problem in five minutes that would take the Pascal apps running on 286's about three hours to solve.) So to Kent I would suggest rather set up a comparison using something mathematically intensive like Matlab - and then ask five people to run simulations on the same system at the same time. This should give you a much better basis for comparison. IMHO, of course. - Matthew
