Author: Keith Evans
Date: 19:00:04 06/08/03
Go up one level in this thread
On June 08, 2003 at 20:09:40, Ryan B. wrote: >On June 08, 2003 at 17:27:48, Tom Kerrigan wrote: > >>On June 08, 2003 at 00:52:54, Ryan B. wrote: >> >>>What programs and what price range you looking at? I'm sure crafty would run >>>great on a Sun Blade 150 and the price is rather reasonable. >>>http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/BrowsePage.jhtml?catid=85825 If your looking >>>for the best price to performance ratio I think AMD is the front-runner. But >>>I?m not much of a fan for Intels high-end prices on low-end hardware, just my >>>opinion though. >> >>Problem being, the Sun Blade 150 is a pile of shit. >> >>Seriously, a 650MHz US-IIi? >> >>It gets 283 on the Crafty SPEC test. A 500MHz Athlon can beat that score. It's >>mind-blowing that Sun is charging $1395 for a computer that would get its ass >>whooped by a PC from, like, 4 years ago. >> >>Just for fun, I went to newegg and priced a system with similar specs to the Sun >>Blade 150. Unfortunately, they don't sell parts that are old enough, so I had to >>go with a DVD drive (instead of just CD), a processor that's more than twice as >>fast (1.1GHz Athlon), and an AGP graphics card with 3D acceleration (vs. a 2D >>PCI card). The total price came to $253. >> >>So if you go with a PC, you get a system that's twice as fast for 1/5th the >>price. Price/performance advantage of 10x... hmm... >> >>-Tom > >If you are concerned with price/performance ratio you can get a 386 system for >$1. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2733773366&category=3742 > However if you prefer using a better OS, having a better programming >environment, and using quality hardware Sun isn't so bad a choice. For a cheep >second computer to run PC/windows programs I think AMD is a practical choice of >hardware. Also I sincerely hope you do not believe that an Athlon 500 is really >faster than a Blade 150 computer. Benchmarks do not always show real world >performance. For example according to some benchmarks my amiga 4000 is faster >than my Pentium 100. This is not realistic. Also my Duron 800 scores better on >CPU and gpu benchmarks than my G4 450 Mac. In real world tests using PhotoShop >and PovRay the Mac beats the Duron 800 almost every time. Did you happen to >notice in my first post I asked, What programs and what price range you looking >at? He could prefer running Window, Mac OS, or even Amiga Workbench for all I >know. The sun was just a suggestion and personal platform preference from me. >In the end it's all in what your most comfortable with, but if you want real >world performance I don't think a PC will be best in any tasks other than simple >math, and impressive benchmarking. > >Ryan NVidea uses a hell of a lot of x86 servers to run chip simulations. (There's a website out there somewhere that shows their server room.) There's a reason that Sun isn't doing very well. A few years back I had an Ultra 5 which I ended up using as a monitor stand. The only reason to buy a low end Sun is if you have some software that requires it. For example in the ASIC business you're likely to run into old vendor tools that require it. At work we have one Sun server for just that purpose, but the x86 boxes lap it when running Synopsys VCS. (I think that a 3GHz Xeon is at least 8-16X the speed of an Ultra 360.) Keith
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