Sun rips You off
Don’t get me wrong, I love Sun’s cool front cover for their servers which, uh, can be more expensive than a Dodge Viper. The Sun Fire E25K looks like it kicks ass every day. But for the workstations, is there any reason to charge USD 1900 more for the same configuration when someone simply chooses an UltraSPARC III instead of a Core 2 Duo? Especially when there are no concrete, well publicized benchmarks out there for the USIII? Just how fast is it anyway?
The UltraSPARC III was released in 2001, and seems to be the main working horse of Sun’s SPARC offerings (an UltraSPARC IV is simply two USIIIs bolted together with a better FPU). When I get rich, I’m going onto eBay and buying up Sun Ultras with USIIs, SGIs, Performas and don’t you forget the lovely Compaq Alphaserver, preferably the EV6 with the RBMC extensions. I also want the EV7z!!! In any case there’s no way that SPARC processor could be outperforming any x86 CPU being sold nowadays, which means its starting price tag of USD 2800 for a single core, single threaded 1.3GHz USIII (which means if you want a 2CPU config, you need USD 5600) is a total ripoff, or, an assfuck. Of course, it does come with 1GB of DDR333, instead of the USD 900 Core 2 Duo which comes with only 512MB. Oh wait, these are supposed to be workstations!??? Give me a break, the USIV isn’t even here, not to mention the USIV+.
There’s also the Sun XVR-100, which is basically a Radeon 7000 for ‘less than USD300′. Haha, funny. I got my Radeon 7000 for free, bitches. Wisely, they chose to downplay its 3D capabilities… although unwise is the man who bought into this for USD300. Oh, I just noticed. USD295. Might as well buy the XVR-300, which costs the same. Haha! This just goes to prove that eBay is the best, since I can get an UltraSPARC II for just 600. Might be hard to find some EDO RAM with ECC, though.
And apparently 2 USIVs will set you back 30 grand. There’s an image up there that shows 1.8GHz USIV+s outperforming 2.6GHz Opterons by 10% (haha, worth it? Don’t think so) but everyone with half a wit knows you don’t trust vendor benchmarks. And pretty soon it’s obvious why: there were 72 USIVs, compared to 64 Opterons. The real loser of the graph was apparently the IBM POWER5. There were other graphs, like the one on the Sun Ultra 20 page which showed a 2.8GHz Opteron outperforming a C2D and Xeon at 3GHz. That’s so obviously wrong it’s not even funny.
There are also SPARC64 VI CPUs made by Fujitsu (remember the Earth something Simulation supercomputer in Japan? Fujitsu made that), apparently, and apparently those are only used in mainframes. I don’t know if they’re like, faster, or simply include more redundant circuitry, but one thing’s for sure, it probably won’t beat the pants off an x86 system anytime soon. Or a x64 one, for that matter. The prices aren’t listed, I suppose they’re still working on a 128bit CPU that will finally be able to work out the amount of digits required to buy one of them SPARC Enterprise M8000s. Sarcasm aside, I still want one. For a reasonable price, like all the money I have in my bank, for instance.
I don’t know much about this industry, save that I could build a system which would make me wet myself using OTS hardware with ‘only’ USD 2000. No wonder everybody pays attention to Sun’s x64 offerings instead. Except that they aren’t exactly eye-catching. I’ll make sure to build my own system next time, and pile a bunch of esoteric computer hardware running OpenVMS or the like next to it.
EDIT: At last, the B3 Phenoms are out. Read the review at TechReport, who proclaim that at last, AMD are shipping procs worthy of your attention. The highest end Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition has a faster northbridge speed and performs around the level of a Q6600, while costing up to 80 bucks less. It may not be the best, but I’ll be getting a Phenom X4 once I have the dough (and need). Then the USIIs and Alphas…
EDIT2: Added a few links – Obsolyte, Reputable Systems SGI (don’t buy the dual R12K Octanes, I want one too!) and some other site. I’d better get a job fast. Instead of getting a PS3, why don’t I just get an SGI Octane 2 for 200 bucks more?
