Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 19:29:48 06/09/03
Go up one level in this thread
On June 08, 2003 at 21:43:02, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >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 > >Can't you still get Slowaris for the PC? Actually I think not. But who cares as with Linux around, who in their right mind would want to run Sun's OS anyway? It doesn't offer anything unique... > >Also, what quality hardware? You're falling into the same trap as Mac bigots, >thinking that if you get charged more for something, it must be higher quality. >Do you think Sun makes memory, hard drives, video cards, etc. exclusively for >their own systems, or do you think that if you open up one of those Sun >workstations, you'll see that it's full of the same commodity hardware found in >PCs? It says right on their site that their PGX64 graphics card is just a >rebrand of the thoroughly antiquated ATI Rage XL. You can get one of those for >your PC for $20 if you find a store that still has some. I don't think Sun offers anything today. They were SCSI pioneers. They now ship IDE mostly. Slow CD drives. Slow disk drives. Pitiful graphics cards. They do some decent packaging for clusters, but then again so does Dell and IBM at cheaper prices with _far_ higher performance. > >>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 > >SPECint benchmarks Crafty, which is a real world program. Do you think the >Crafty section of SPECint is somehow not indicative of Crafty's performance? How >do you explain that? > The Suns are just dogs, plain and simple. Its a lousy semi-64bit processor that isn't sure what it is really trying to be (I hope the Opteron doesn't turn into the same thing). We run all kinds of benchmarks here. FP numerical applications, crafty (of course), network traffic performance (solaris is terrible for network throughput... for example my linux boxes can drive a gigabit link at 750-800 megabits per second sustained for long periods. Sun can't touch that). >>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. > >Sure, impressive benchmarking like Crafty benchmarking, MySQL benchmarking, >PovRay benchmarking, Linux kernel compile benchmarking, you know, stuff that >isn't real-world. > >-Tom For once we agree on something. Not that it is good for Sun, of course. But someone should try to put together a 2.5M nps Sun box for Crafty, and compare it to the price of my dual xeon box. It will take a _bunch_ of sun SPARC processors... and I do mean a +bunch+.
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