> > I noticed today that Sun has stopped selling Sparc > > based desktop machines. I was sort of shocked by > this > > to say the least. I have to support applications > that > > have endian issues, and this could be painful. > > > > Does anyone know if Fujitsu or another vendor will > > pick up the slack? > > Who can say for sure? > > I would speculate that noone will step up to the > plate. With SPARC systems being rediculously > expensive and with little to offer in comparison to a > modern CPU multicore-NVidia monster-accelerator-with > audiophile-8+1-high-def-sound PC-bucket, SPARC on the > desktop has been scheduled to get the ax for a while > now; it's was really only a question of "when", not > "if". I mean, how can an expensive SPARC system > compare to a modern PC-bucket-monster in price and > performance (try getting a comparable SPARC system > for about $2,000 USD!)?
If only a T2 based workstation could be produced at a reasonable price including a decent basic graphics card (and these days I think "basic" should _include_ some 3D acceleration as well as the capability and bandwidth to drive full 1080p video), I think that would kick tail as a workstation. Even though the clock rate (single-thread performance, ultimately) isn't that impressive, having enough threads that the X server, its clients, and the various background processes are almost never competing with each other should mean that even if it wasn't blazing fast, it would at least almost never be noticably jerky, the total forward progress would be considerable, and if one wanted to run some services (like an internal web server, say) too, that would be no big deal. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
