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Sun Microsystems Hardware

Sun's new UltraSPARC workstation: the Blade 1500 516

Posted by michael from the sunshine-lollipops-and-rainbows-everywhere dept.
Roman Hauptmann writes "Here's a review of Sun's newest single-CPU workstation based on the UltraSPARC IIIi processor. According to the review, the system barely performs on the level of a P4 1.8ghz machine yet it sells for several times the price. Despite that, the Blade series still brings value to those who do visualization and imaging."
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Sun's new UltraSPARC workstation: the Blade 1500 More

Sun's new UltraSPARC workstation: the Blade 1500

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  • fubar (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    still brings value to those who do visualization and imaging

    And that have more money than sense.

  • 80GB Seagate drive? (Score:5, Informative)

    by WombatDeath ( 681651 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @06:18PM (#8010199)
    I'd hope that, for $3-4k, they could do a bit better than an 80GB (2MB cache) Seagate drive. Do "those who do visualization and imaging" really not care about the performance of their storage?

    I've never yet seen a machine which skimps on its essential components justify its price tag. No surprise here.

  • Performace (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vpscolo ( 737900 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @06:20PM (#8010211) Homepage
    Comparing Sun with x86 is a bit apples and oranges. Maybe on sheer performance it will be beaten by x86 however for crunching big data sets the UltraSparc is just more effecient. Also some software only runs on Solaris so for that this box is good. However I did wonder why it came with Solaris 8 rather than something newer Rus
    • How can paying more for a system that doesn't perform as well as comparable hardware be "more efficient?" The primary drive is an IDE drive with only a 2MB cache. You're right, Solaris 8 is definitely a weird choice considering that 9 has been out for so long.

      Also, are there really that many pieces of good software that only run on Solaris these days?

      • Re:Performace (Score:3, Informative)

        by jaavaaguru ( 261551 )
        Sun's DBX debugger is an excellent tool (GDB doesn't give you the fork-following options that DBX supports). AFAIK, it only runs on Solaris. Very useful for development of software that requires to fork.

    • Re:Performace (Score:5, Informative)

      by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @06:26PM (#8010260)
      Maybe on sheer performance it will be beaten by x86 however for crunching big data sets the UltraSparc is just more effecient.
      ----------
      If by "efficient" you mean "more instructions per clock" than yes, UltraSPARC is more efficient. But workstation people really don't care about efficiency. They care about total instructions executed per second. And x86 machines have the upper hand here.

      There are lots of advantages to Sun hardware generally, but this machine doesn't seem to have those:

      - Sun machines usually have high-quality SCSI disk drives. This machine has a standard PC IDE drive.
      - Sun machines usually have support for many CPUs. This machine supports one.
      - Sun machines usually have insane memory bandwidth. This machine has less bandwidth than a P4.
      - Sun machines usually have extensive I/O capabilities. This machine has your standard 64/66 PCI slots.

      • Re:Performace (Score:5, Informative)

        by thewiz ( 24994 ) * on Saturday January 17, 2004 @08:56PM (#8011040)
        There are lots of advantages to Sun hardware generally, but this machine doesn't seem to have those:

        - Sun machines usually have high-quality SCSI disk drives. This machine has a standard PC IDE drive.
        - Sun machines usually have support for many CPUs. This machine supports one.
        - Sun machines usually have insane memory bandwidth. This machine has less bandwidth than a P4.
        - Sun machines usually have extensive I/O capabilities. This machine has your standard 64/66 PCI slots.
        You forgot to mention that Sun USED to manufacture their own machines. Now they have Acer Computers do it for them (literally!).

    • Re:Performace (Score:3, Informative)

      by TheSunborn ( 68004 )
      It only got 1MB Cache and a rather slow harddisk. And it can't take more then 4GB ram so I really can't imagine what kind of task it would be good at.

      It does have a nice 3D card but 3d is one of the things that really DO require number chrunching, so putting the Wildcat in PC with the fastest Pentium IV/Athlon would give a faster and cheeper system.

      The only use for this system as far as I can see is for people who need to run Solaris and for some reason can't run it on intel.

    • Re:Performace (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mod Me God ( 686647 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @06:34PM (#8010321)
      I wonder that also, but a choice quote:

      I really wanted to test the graphics capabilities of this machine, but the program just wouldn't compile properly. I spent days searching Google, reading forums, and sifting through mailing lists looking for answers. I made some progress, but after delaying this story for more than a week I decided it was time to publish it one way or the other.

      Why not just ask Sun, they designed it! The reviewer may not have the gold-with-bells-and-whistles support contract (not the Solaris expertise most admins/users would have, seemingly), but for a sneak peak review of a system I'm sure they would have been happy to help out.

      Likewise ...measuring performance was a very difficult task because of the amount of reading, research, and configuration that had to go into Solaris 8 to get it to compile benchmark programs.. Now I'm sure Sun had not had a wet dream one day and come up with a whole new processor without coming up with a way to test it. Why not ask them, I'm sure they would oblige, and if not flame them in the review? Better that than search on newsgrops for a computer only you have.

      This 'review' was an example of utterly incompetant analysis and journalism.

      • oh the irony (Score:5, Funny)

        by DrSkwid ( 118965 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @06:40PM (#8010356) Journal

        incompetant

        did you mean incompetent ?

      • Re:Performace (Score:5, Informative)

        by ValourX ( 677178 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @07:20PM (#8010573) Homepage

        Okay, I know this is feeding the trolls and such, but I knew this issue would come up.

        I did ask Sun, not only for benchmarks that they used for testing, but at very least for results that they'd gotten from their SPEC benchmarks that everybody runs. I waited, re-requested and did not receive them.

        The reason why SPEC ViewPerf wouldn't install was because of a problem with GCC that I couldn't figure out and couldn't get from Google. Since it wasn't an issue with Solaris 8 (well, sort of) and wasn't an issue with the hardware, I didn't publish anything that I couldn't verify personally. If you feel that's poor journalism then, quite frankly, you don't belong on the Internet.

        The Blade 1500 has been for sale since November. It's completely unreasonable to assume that only I had access to it...

        -Jem

    • Re:Performace (Score:4, Insightful)

      by colins ( 432 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @09:39PM (#8011263) Homepage
      +5 Insightful? Please.

      "crunching big data sets" means what? Unless your application needs to stuff >4GB of data into RAM at once, a decent Xeon will outperform the UltraSparc III/IIIi by an order of magnitude.

      We've switched from UltraSparcs to x86 servers for our reservoir simulations (Oil&Gas), and we're looking to switch to x86 workstations as soon as our vendors all line up behind the same RedHat release.

      We'll keep a couple of Sun boxes around for the rare cases where we really need 64bit (until Opteron is supported by our vendors), but even with the huge datasets with deal with (offshore seismic projects) these instances are rare.

      colins

    • Re:Performace (Score:3, Informative)

      by oingoboingo ( 179159 )
      Maybe on sheer performance it will be beaten by x86 however for crunching big data sets the UltraSparc is just more effecient

      Could you provide hard evidence of UltraSPARC systems beating comparably priced Athlon64 or Opteron systems for large data set problems? There are a lot of people in this discussion regurgitating that old chestnut. While it might have been true 5 years ago comparing an UltraSPARC workstation to a 32-bit Pentium III system with a constipated little 133MHz bus, times have most defin

  • Wow (Score:2, Funny)

    by keesh ( 202812 ) *
    That's ugly. I'd like one, but does it ship with a can of spray paint to get rid of the huge red blob? Looks like an angel or something...

  • Article w/o Perspective (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17, 2004 @06:22PM (#8010237)
    From the article:
    The SunPCI III is the most innovative piece of computer hardware I have ever seen. Put simply, it's a small AMD-based computer built into a single PCI card

    What's so innovative about that? Apple had intel cpu's on pci card for the original powermacs and Sun has had similar cards for awhile.

    • Re:Article w/o Perspective (Score:4, Informative)

      by chill ( 34294 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @06:30PM (#8010300) Journal
      Commodore did an "Bridge Card" for the Amiga 2000 way back in 1986-1987. Both 8088 and 80286 and it "bridged" the Amiga's Zorro slots and the included ISA slots, allowing the use of both Amiga and PC hardware.

      This concept has been around for a while, this is just a refinement.

      • Also newer Amiga's have PCI slots, Amiga 1200 Towers have PCI slots and drivers for normal PC based hardware. But Sun's PC card does work rather well, and if you have to use windows, its a nice option.

        I have a sunblade 100 on my desk, upgraded from an Ultra (dont know if I would call it an upgrade...) But I was only using it for xwindows and running screen on it. Finally decided to put SuSE on it, but the version was getting old, and Suse dropped Sparc. I threw Gentoo Sparc on it the other day, even wen

  • What a scam! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @06:24PM (#8010246)
    Despite that, the Blade series still brings value to those who do visualization and imaging.

    This is by far the most overrated device since the Hindenburg won the 1937 Lakehurst Best Lighter-than-air Aircraft competition.

    -- Ray Charles

  • 64 bit dominance (Score:4, Insightful)

    by damacer ( 713360 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @06:24PM (#8010247)
    From the article:

    "The proprietary 64-bit workstation market is dominated by Sun Microsystems, which sells more 64-bit machines than any other company -- their market share is over 60%."

    I wonder how long this market domninance is going to last now that commodity hardware is going 64. (e.g. a 64-bit laptop for $1,549 [com.com])

  • Eww. Looks worse than an iMac (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17, 2004 @06:24PM (#8010248)
    Uglist. Box. Evar. That red dot -- if you punch it hard enough, does it explode (assuming you make it through the AT field...)?

  • Stop. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Stop thinking of computers in terms of speed. Think more of what works for the job. Sun servers can handle far more RAM then Intel machines making them perfect for large databases. They can handle more CPUs then Intel machines, perfect for when clustering isn't an option.

    Just because this workstation has less gigahertz then another doesn't mean it's wrong for everything. Does Grandma need it? No, she'll be fine with an Intel or an AMD.

    • Re:Stop. (Score:4, Informative)

      by bhtooefr ( 649901 ) <bhtooefr@bhtoo[ ].org ['efr' in gap]> on Saturday January 17, 2004 @06:52PM (#8010426) Homepage Journal
      RTFA. It has one CPU socket, and I've heard a maximum of 2.0GB RAM. Also, I'm not having any problems with less gigahertz - keep in mind, I'm pushing the Pentium M, which has a very high IPC as compared to the P4. I'm saying that a rig that performs like a P4 1.8 and costs $5K is a total ripoff. Sure, it has a great video card, but I'd like to take a Blade 1500 Light, and take an Athlon 64 3000+ (which is used for two reasons: "I'm cheap, but my dick is still longer than yours", and it's a cheap way of having a CPU that can handle 64-bit apps when they become available) with a Radeon 9800 Pro, 512MB of whatever the best RAM for that system is, a nice fast HDD (maybe SATA, just to make it unfair), a Plextor DVD +/- RW, etc., etc., and find out how much it costs, and if the US3i is blown out of the water (if a 3000+ can kill a P4EE, and a P4EE, by nature, can kill a P41.8, it's kinda obvious), and do the same on video card (3d rendering tests, maybe?).

  • Learning from Mistakes (Score:3, Informative)

    by jonbrewer ( 11894 ) * on Saturday January 17, 2004 @06:27PM (#8010274) Homepage
    Hopefully anyone who made the mistake of a Blade 1000 will stay far away. Performance from Sun workstations has been sub-par for years now.

    I had a good laugh when one of my Intel workstations and a colleague's Blade 1000 were both hooked up to a compute grid. The benchmarks for BLAST [nih.gov], the bioinformatics tool we were running on the grid, showed my PIII running circles around the bioinformatics geek's favorite machine. What's better is that the Intel machine (an IBM), was bought new for less than $1000, and the Blade had been purchased for over $5000!
  • The SunPCI III is the most innovative piece of computer hardware I have ever seen. Put simply, it's a small AMD-based computer built into a single PCI card -- it actually has an Athlon XP 1600+ processor, an onboard AGP 8X graphics chip, onboard 10/100 LAN and two DDR slots which in my test machine were populated with two 512MB modules. This machine within a machine is run through the SunPCI software and is started through a premade startup script that was placed in my default user's home directory. Run the

  • Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MrPerfekt ( 414248 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @06:33PM (#8010314) Homepage Journal
    It's never a suprised that people on slashdot just don't get Sun equipment. Much like Apple, companies (I'd wager extremely few people buy Sun's for personal everyday use) that buy these boxes are buying them for the OS and rarely for the groundbreaking hardware.

    They like the support that Sun provides with thier OS and how it's been grown to be rock solid. Yada, yada, yada. Cut to the posts here by people that probably have never seen a Sun box let alone owned/used one and I'm not shocked.

    Disclaimer: This is not a troll. ;)

    • Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17, 2004 @06:35PM (#8010329)
      You hit the nail on the head.

      These are also the same people who enjoy particpating in system administration discussions when their system administration experience only stems from the 4 boxes they have at home.

      Here on Slashdot, 90% of people at any given time are just armchair quarterbacks.

      • 90%? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by rebelcool ( 247749 )
        More like 99%.. for supposed nerds, you'd think more of them would have more of a clue about the various facets of computing.

    • Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by prockcore ( 543967 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @07:08PM (#8010512)
      At work we buy Sun hardware because it's probably the most reliable hardware you can buy.

      However, lately, we've been having trouble justifying the costs. A cheap linux box will get the job done, even if we need to have cheap backups around for any hardware failures.

    • Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by lewp ( 95638 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @07:16PM (#8010550) Journal
      Sun's support is certainly impressive, especially if you're not used to it. And their hardware/software is impressive from a reliability standpoint.

      But come on. This is a workstation. As long as it can stay up for a day at a time it's reliable enough, and it's cheaper to just keep a spare or five in the closet than to pay for the kind of support that people think of when they think Sun. Beyond the basic reliability that anything better than Windows 98 can provide, raw performance and price are going to be the deciding factors for this kind of system. Sun just can't play with the big PC manufacturers in both areas at once.

      If this were a big Sun Fire box, you'd have a point. As it stands, Slashdotters are probably this machine's best hope: geeks with some disposable income who want a neat toy. After all, you bought a Blade 150, didn't you?

    • Re:Sun and Slashdot, like oil and water... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Arker ( 91948 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @08:07PM (#8010853) Homepage

      In the old days that was all true. It's less so now. Particularly with models like this one. Linux and *BSD have progressed to the point they're better for most purposes than Solaris. And the new low end Suns give up most of the advantages Sun machines traditionally hold. This one, for example, has less I/O bandwidth than many Intel boxes, can't take huge amounts of memory, uses a cheap IDE hard drive, doesn't support multiple processors, etc. I wouldn't bet on it lasting forever like old Sun boxes do either, though that's just a guess. But if you look at Suns low end offerings, they definately seem to be cheap.

      There are still good reasons to go with something besides x86 architecture, to be sure. But I'd have to say that IBM and Apple look like better bets than Sun these days.

    • It's never a suprised that people on slashdot just don't get Sun equipment.

      I used to buy Sun machines by the dozens--back when they gave me good bang-for-the-buck and when they were the best of the UNIX workstation bunch (of course, even back then, it was GNU software that made Solaris tolerable). Today, PCs give me more bang-for-the-buck and Linux and BSD have become far better operating systems, so there is no reason to like or advocate Sun workstations anymore.

      Much like Apple, companies (I'd wager e
  • Why are they using an obsolete OS version?
    Why not at least install Solaris 9?
    ver 9 has been out long enough!

    this just doesn't make sense.
    as for performance, I have an ultra-10 here with 128mb of ram, 300mhz cpu, with aurora linux 1.0 and it out-performs a p4/1.6ghz system (for compiling software)...

    just weird...

    • Re:why is it pre-installed with solaris 8? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nkrgovic ( 311833 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @08:17PM (#8010895)
      Because there is no Solaris 9 port for either this, or the Blade 2500 workstation yet! It's supposed to be out around April.

      Now, to performance:

      On both workstations you can get XVR-600 which is lightning fast and extra high quality. It's a Wildcat 4 chip (3D Labs) with 10-bit pixel precision and dedicated texture ram. The least expensive card like this for the PC is around $1K5 (Wildcat 4 7110) Also you can't get Linux drivers for it yet.

      As for the P4/1.8GHz story try this for a test : Install MySQL on your linux PC and create a database with a table of about 5-6GB. Run alter table on it. Wait for it CRUMBLE TO DUST as it hits past 2GBs. Then get a Sun.

      Opteron might be the only challenger to sparc (which is why Sun is pushing for opteron-based servers), but it's main faults are :

      Still has no real applications ported to it.

      Can't scale beyond 8-cpu's. If you don't need that - well... Plenty people do - in servers at least. This isn't a workstation issue, but is a server one.

      Integrated memory controllers are a bitch on multi-cpu systems if you need one cpu to access all memory, while the other is still doing something. This is the main reason why sun still sells Blade 2000, now that Blade 2500 has hit the market.

      As for true workstation features check out Blade 2000 [sun.com](2 cpu's, UPA graphics, FC-AL disks), or Blade 2500 [sun.com] (2 cpu's, scsi disks). Both more expensive (especially Blade 2000 which uses Ultra III CPU's without integrated memory controllers, but with a real crossbar switch instead), but they are still A LOT less expensive than their SGI or IBM counterparts. Sun isn't competing with the PC's with this WS, it's just for the people who need a cheap ws for home, remote work or something like that. As the author of the article puts it "make no mistake: this is a workhorse, not a pony or a racehorse"

      • As for the P4/1.8GHz story try this for a test : Install MySQL on your linux PC and create a database with a table of about 5-6GB. Run alter table on it. Wait for it CRUMBLE TO DUST as it hits past 2GBs. Then get a Sun.

        Now create that same database with MySQL on a Sun box (I don't think you can get > 3.2 for Solaris) and watch it crumble as well. It's not Linux or any other OS, for that matter... it's MySQL that dies.

  • He doesn't get it... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PhunkySchtuff ( 208108 ) <kai@automatica.c[ ]au ['om.' in gap]> on Saturday January 17, 2004 @07:07PM (#8010507) Homepage
    The reviewer just doesn't get it. The reason you get a machine like this is so that you can run the same software, unchanged, on your big 32 or 64 CPU fridge-sized machine in the back room as you can on your desktop workstation. You run the same OS, the same binaries, use the same dev tools and you just know it will work. If it doesn't work, someone from Sun will be around to fix it, quickly.
    As for going on about the "Restrictive" license surrounding Solaris. For fuck's sake, it's FREE (as in beer) to download and use - for Sparc and Intel.
    And then there are automatic software updates that you have to accept? WTF? is he on drugs?
    Sun have recommended patch clusters (AKA Service Packs) and individual patches that you are free to download and install as you choose. There's nothing compulsory about them.
    Oh, and there's no.... RESET BUTTON!
    I dunno about anyone else who uses Solaris out there, but I've _never_ seen a Sun machine lock up hard, such that a Reset Button would have been the solution...
    Stick to reviewing your latest 0verclocked AMD with peltier and watercooling and neon casemods...
    - k

  • Sun Blade 2000 - 2x UltraSPARC III+ (Score:4, Interesting)

    by aSiTiC ( 519647 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @07:07PM (#8010508) Homepage
    My research group got a nice Sun Blade 2000 with dual UltraSPARC III+ (basically UltraSPARC III with coppper interconnects).

    I wrote a computational scientific program in Matlab for my research group. I then tested it out on the Sun Blade and my own P4 3.06 GHz w/ HT laptop. The Sun Blade computed at nearly 3X the speed of the Pentium 4. Now we are wondering why we didn't just buy a nice custom built PC for 1/3 the price...

    I also realize Matlab runs poorly on Unix due to FP instruction sets not being available. Still I've tested Ansofts HFSS as well with similar results.

    • Re:Sun Blade 2000 - 2x UltraSPARC III+ (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SoupIsGood Food ( 1179 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @08:31PM (#8010953)
      It's a matter of matching the software to the hardware. If you run commodity software designed for commodity systems, you're going to get better results from the dual x86 box. If you run a software environment designed for Solaris and UltraSPARCIII, you're going to see significant speed advantages... and you're already seeing a 3x speed bump in your application on a platform it's not optimized for.

      Still, if that's not enough extra oomph, look into Fujitsu's SPARC clones. They can outpace Itanium and Alpha systems, and are less money than Sun-branded boxes. Sun's contracted with Fujitsu for future SPARC development, so the performance gap will be widening. The systems will still be ludicrously expensive. Whether the investment in bigger iron will be worth it depends on how parallelizable your code is. Sometimes two big CPUs trump a bunch of teensy ones (Amdahl's law and all that)... sometimes a grid application running on a hundred different systems in the office as a screen saver will do the trick.

      SoupIsGood Food

  • The reviewer is missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jdigital ( 84195 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @07:28PM (#8010628) Homepage
    Disclaimer: I was a sun nut. I have moved to Linux/x86 as it is cheaper; so take everything with a grain of salt. However, it is quite clear that most of the complaints raised in the article stem from "i'm not used to solaris/sun, therefore its not good", rather than any intrinsic complaints.
    That means that you can have Windows XP Pro running in a window in CDE (the standard UNIX desktop environment) or on a separate monitor that can be connected to the SunPCI card itself. This is not a software emulator -- it's actually Windows XP running on the SunPCI through Solaris -- so there is no measurable loss in performance while using the SunPCI.

    1. SunPCI cards have been around for a while
    2. Apple used to do this
    3. In the late 80's I had a 8088 ISA daughterboard which sat inside my 8086.
    4. There is a performance loss. On my Ultra workstation I ran a development database, and used the SunPCI for Outlook and other things. The SunPCI card maps 'C:' to a file sitting in your home directory. There is contention for the drive. Addition of another drive fixes this.

    The keyboard and mouse (which add $25 to the cost of the machine) can best be described as "painful." Extremely painful.

    1. Keyboards are a pretty personal issue. Without saying what he/she felt was wrong, most people will not know whether their experience will be similar.
    2. From my experience with sun keyboards from IPX's to Ultra's, I've found them quite to my liking.
    3. The complaints about the size of the keyboard and the redundant keys just illustrates a lack of knowledge of how useful they can be.

    Solaris is an excellent operating system in terms of stability, reliability, and professional support, but you'll find it quite difficult to set up and maintain it on your own and it can be difficult to find much software for it.

    1. sunfreeware.com
    2. This guy is contradicting himself. He states in the opening line that there is excellent professional support, but later complains that there is no large friendly support community. In my experience, I've only ever needed to contact Sun when the sh*t has hit the fan. Most of my support came from many of the useful sun related lists and web pages. GIYF (google is your friend)
    3. ...plan on spending some time every now and then fooling with installing various programs and editing files just so you can get Linux binary compatibility or even just install a simple program like The GIMP.... Um, download required libraries or packages, build/install. Compile GIMP, run GIMP. Sounds pretty familiar to the Linux experience to me. What crack was he on with "Linux binary compatibility...".

    Solaris in its current form can never be Free Software or even open-source because of all of the proprietary code that it contains.

    1. I have the Solaris 8 Intel and SPARC source CD's sitting right here. They were available to purchase for around $40 from sun.com a year back or so. This offer was open to everyone. I'm just a hobbyist dude, not a governmental organisation, eductaional institution -- i.e., I certainly stand no chance in hell of getting the Windows XP source code.
    2. The entire section on Licencing is just meaningless crap.
    The conclusion gets it spot on:
    It serves unique purposes in many important industries, in niches that IA32 (x86) or Apple PPC systems cannot support due to software and architectural constraints, therefore it cannot truly be compared with such systems. If it stands up to other machines in its class is a determination that I have yet to make...

  • Hammers and Screwdrivers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Weaselmancer ( 533834 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @07:30PM (#8010646)

    I'd second the idea that the reviewer doesn't entirely understand the target audience for this machine.

    The article also includes a link to the product's PDF datasheet [sun.com]. Please read before you bash.

    But just in case you don't feel like skimming through the PDF, the relevant points seem to be that it:

    • Is meant to run Solaris
    • Is compatible with Sun's XVR graphics accelerators
    • Has built-in 10/100/1000 ethernet capability

    To me, this looks like a box intended to do hugely accelerated 3D graphics in a unixish environment. That's it's niche. I'd bet it's 3D rendering performance is nothing short of stunning.

    Remember - big companies have marketing departments, entire sections of the building dedicated to answering the question "what should we charge for it?" For someone who needs a machine like this I'll bet that it's worth every penny.

    Saying that it sucks because it's dhrystone score is as low as a box 1/5th it's cost is like complaining that a hammer makes a lousy screwdriver. You're not using the tool for its intended job.

    Weaselmancer

  • how is SPARC proprietary? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17, 2004 @07:36PM (#8010693)
    I never could figure out how (Ultra)SPARC was considered proprietary. You can license the specs for it at http://www.sparc.com/

    Heck, Fuji did an independent-from-Sun implementation of the UltraSPARC V processor.

    I would say that Intel and AMD are more proprietary than SPARC. Or is there some place I can license the 'code' to the Pentium 4 that I don't know about?

    Heck, Suns even use PCI now (previous Suns used to use SBUS).

  • Sun hardware (Score:3, Insightful)

    by saunabad ( 664414 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @07:47PM (#8010765)

    From the article: The keyboard and mouse (which add $25 to the cost of the machine) can best be described as "painful." Extremely painful. I couldn't use them for more than five minutes without my wrists hurting, and it is impossible for me to imagine anyone using these 80s-era throwbacks

    I like this. Sun peripherals have always been able to give me the feeling that says "Listen punk, these machines are not made for fun, they are made for working. If this would be a pleasant experience, it wouldn't count as working, would it?"

  • Sun is about service (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ducomputergeek ( 595742 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @08:03PM (#8010837)
    Enterprise level datacenters...raise their hand! If your running a SUN certified program and you upgrade and it no longer works, SUN will send someone to toubleshoot and fix it. How many other companies garuntee that? Does Red Hat? Novell? Microsoft? Um....that would be a big fat no. Too many companies, that level support is critical because the loss of say an ERP or even CRM system could mean the loss of thousands if not hundreds of the thousands of dollars.

    Trust me, you can spend 5x's as much trouble shooting old software on new systems then it would have cost for "equal" performance if you had spent 3x's as much on the hardware in the first place...

  • Disappointed Sun Guy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ChaosMt ( 84630 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @08:05PM (#8010842) Homepage
    Look, I'm a long time solaris admin and I actually like to run most of my home systems on sun hardware with openbsd (can't wait to try freebsd soon; linux just doesn't work right on it yet). I love to remote console in. In the end, I have to agree with some of the author's disappointment.

    First, it should be noted, you're a newbie or sucker if you're paying the retail price listed on the web site. Start your negotionations for the price by knocking of 1/3rd. This applys more for bigger systems, but it's close for small ones too. About support, skip it if this is your only system. I've found their warrenty support just fine and very helpful. However, if you're a medium sized shop, consider getting the platinum support. I've called all the big boys under super-boffo support accounts. HP has trouble just picking up the phone. IBM: we'll call you back when we found someone whom we think is who you want. Cisco: we sell that? Sun: two rings, serial number, knowledgable person opens case and starts working on it while getting [storage|OS|kernel|hardware|etc] expert on the phone, and in the mean time, the field engineer has already contacted to courier to get the new hardware there in under and hour, at three in the morning. I'm not exagerating either. Yes, this level is support is DAMN expensive, but it's comparatively cheaper than their competitors. The difference is that when you buy sun's deluxe support, they really mean it. For every other vendor, it's the same support faster.

    Second, I am tired of them selling low quality workstations to their loyal users. The blade150 is flimsy and flakey; especially to those who remember the sparc2s. They were like armored pizze boxes! This new blade just looks like more of the same. The 150 has no normal way to play cds (for example). Why, oh WHY did you go with USB ports if you don't fully want to suport usb devices. The authors right about the keyboard and mouse quality. Well, it's not THAT bad - I consider the apple ones worse. But for the price, it should be much much better. Or better yet, fully support standard keyboards and mice. Map the sun keys to something else. Help bolthole.com make the mouse wheel work better. I just got the lowest end hp-ux workstation. It comes with dual scsi, and it could be considered similarly priced. IDE has always been chinzy. Serial ata would have been a great comprimse. My next work station? Mac.

    Third, you're not SGI, and stop making your hardware look like it. Get over it. Frankly, pixar and other grapics outlets aren't in love with you anymore. Let it go. Move on. All the bioinfomatics I talk to are going apple.

    Forth, clean up your packages, and MAKE PATCHING WORK RIGHT!!! HP and AIX - stick in a cd, reboot. BSD - painless. MS - automated. Even linux is better. Anyone running a large installation sun shop will tell you; sun patching sucks. Take a clue from bsd, linux or aix or even MS; make your systems easy to set up and administer, and you gain the respect and approval of the geeks who sign off on the tech side of the decision. I've lost trust and trust my solutions to patching much better than live update (at this point).

    Last, what the hell is it with your cheap ass sales people. Is the sun logo so expensive that you can't afford to give out tshirts, cups and other good will crap to your biggest customers. Pizza?!? WTF! HP gave the whole department some of the best vendor shirts we've ever had. IBM gets us drinks and cigars. EMC tooks us to the matrix the day BEFORE it opened. I can go on and on. Instead, as one of your biggest clients in the region we get bad pizza and bad patches?!?

    Ok... I got it out of my system. Thank for that.

    • Re:Disappointed Sun Guy (Score:3, Interesting)

      by 0x0d0a ( 568518 )
      Even linux is better.

      "Even" Linux? Good *God*, man. Debian had things down to "apt-get update;apt-get upgrade;", and Red Hat is down to "yum update". How little typing (or few characters for your cron job) do you *need* before you're happy?

      I admit that if you install a new kernel, you're going to have to reboot the machine to start taking advantage of it.

      Last, what the hell is it with your cheap ass sales people. Is the sun logo so expensive that you can't afford to give out tshirts, cups and other

    • Re:Disappointed Sun Guy (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MROD ( 101561 )
      Here! Here!

      Well, on the case of the patch problem. One of the Solaris strategy people was at a recent technology update day I attended. When I brought up the patch issue he sighed and agreed how terrible it was. He said things were going to improve but probably not to the degree he or I would like, mostly due to the big customers having the patchadd stuff entrenched. Hey-ho!

      There IS a new patching tool available now from SunSolve but it's not exactly the bee's knees.

  • Software is real cost and reliability the priority (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17, 2004 @08:05PM (#8010844)
    I think many responses to this review have missed the point of this system. This is NOT a machine intended for users running benchmarks that demonstrate how much slower it is compared to a similarly priced x86 machine. These machines are targetted at the EDA/CAD/CAM/visualisation clients that spend much more money on Software Licenses than they do on Hardware.

    So, what do you think the priorities of these customers are? Performance? Maybe, but only compared to other machines that offer a similar level of *RELIABILITY*.

    This topic of reliability never gets touched in the article, but is probably the most important aspect of this machine.

    Ask yourself, if you have 20 2-year software licenses that cost $750,000 total, will you skimp on the reliability of the hardware running that software? The extra cash is paid out to protect that large investment in software.

    Are these machines more reliable than comparable (and less expensive) x86 systems? I wouldn't know, and the article makes no mention of this. I'd venture to guess that a company like SUN with a substantial R&D budget produces a better verified and more reliable system than a home built win-x86 system that scores 23000 on 3Dmark2001 (sometimes) and runs circles around that new SUN POS (assuming no crash to desktop or worse).

    Companies that sell UNIX systems (IBM, SUN, HP, SGI) see hardware as a vehicle for selling a software stack and services. And if the software isn't their own, then the selling point is the reliability of the underlying hardware system.

    To shrug off this system based solely on performance is to ignore the most important aspect of this system and others like it: RELIABILITY.

    • Re:Software is real cost and reliability the prior (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      To shrug off this system based solely on performance is to ignore the most important aspect of this system and others like it: RELIABILITY.

      Exactly.
      These machines are not sold to home users.
      Sun's hardware performance has sucked for a very long time but thats not what they sell, they sell Reliability.

      Those CPUs have been tested a LOT more than Intel CPUs.
      I remember the UltraSparc2 which had 1 known bug a year before shipping. The Pentium 3 at *shipping* had 60 known bugs. That is what you pay for.

      To th
    • Users of EDA software care about performance. Time to market is EVERYTHING the highly competitive ASIC markets. Just about everybody is moving to x86 due to it's superior performance - The 64-bit x86 chips from AMD are only going to accelerate this move.

  • Sun w/o Bill Joy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @08:36PM (#8010972) Homepage
    Isn't that like Atari w/o Noland Bushnell, Apple w/o Steve Jobs, SGI w/o Jim Clark...

  • Who's buying these things? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kanly ( 216101 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @08:58PM (#8011050)
    I take care of Sun kit at work, and I can't possibly imagine why anybody is buying these. The place where sun sets themselves apart is in their large machines - dozens of CPUs, piles and piles of SCSI channels, etc. If you're buying high-end sun stuff, you should see if you can do better by clustering cheaper boxes, but sometimes you can't, and the big huge behemoths are a reasonable choice.

    If you're buying SunBlades, though, you need to visit your psychiatrist and have him help you with your white-box phobia. $5k will get you an Opteron box that will run rings around this thing all day long.

  • Price is what you will pay.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by op00to ( 219949 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @09:27PM (#8011186)
    Anyone who pays full price for any Sun gear is getting ripped off! The price on these boxes are always negotiable. You'd be surprised how cost competitive Sun solutions can be when you start talking business with the sales guy.

    Needless to say, being a huge public university helps too.

  • I just installed 3 workstations (Score:3, Informative)

    by Sporkinum ( 655143 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @09:34PM (#8011236)
    I just installed 3 Blade1500 workstations. We run a legacy medical PACS system that is based on Sun boxes. We are running anywhere from Sparc 4s to the Sunblade range. We are currently using the Blades to drive 4 three megapixel x 10 bit Dome monitors. They work great in that application, and that is what our software runs on. The vendor that we have our PACS system with is moving to a PC/Linux platform, but for the legacy software we run now, the Blades offer a lot of bang for the buck.

    BTW, the build quality of the machines is to the usual high Sun standard. I like the looks of them as well.

  • Utterly ironic that... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Genghis9 ( 575560 ) * on Saturday January 17, 2004 @09:46PM (#8011291)
    ...the SunPCI card will probably burn the main machine on equivalent benchmarks under Linux (once it's running on this machine)

  • Sparc IV's and V's ?? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @09:49PM (#8011308) Journal
    Sun and TI better get their dam act together.

    I sense another Motorolla going on here. TI see's only short term costs to upgrade their chip fabrication plants and is screwing Sun. Meanwhile they are losing sparc sales because fustrated customers are switching to lintel and AIX.

    Perhaps sun is testing waters and will likely dump TI if the Sparc IV's and V's which both were supposed to be out by now, are not out soon.

    Perhaps they will use AMD64's for all their systems.

    Sun could use the processor but custom build their high end back planed motherboards and multiple buses known for their servers.

    HP is doing this for their superdome with Itaniums.

    I would be royally pissed if I were Scott McNealy right now. Customers will not upgrade unless newer systems perform significantly better.

    If sales do not go up, McNeally could lose his job. Merryl Lynch already tried to can him last quarter.

  • Article is meaningless (Score:4, Insightful)

    by caesar79 ( 579090 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @09:54PM (#8011336)
    This guy has no idea what he is talking about.

    First things first - sun does not compete on speed. It competes on reliability and stability. Yeah my athlon 1800+ is way faster than my sun blade 100...but if you check the number of reboots, sun wins hands down with 0 in over 2 years.

    Incidentally, I get more work done on the sun m/c.

    Now to the article:
    "...The 350w power supply is made by Samsung, and I would consider it barely adequate for this kind of computer....If I were designing this workstation I would have used a more robust power supply..."

    Yeah sure. If you could you'd put in a nuclear reactor over there!!! Ever heard of power efficiency? Those guys had a good enough reason to stick with a 350W power supply...and trust me, those engineers are no idiots.

    "...I wish it had a drive activity indicator LED and a reset button, which would add a lot of convenience for very little added cost..."

    Reset button ? Sun ? get off your windowz box and work on a sun box for a year. Tell me if you *ever* need to reboot it. (for those who dont know - very few patches require reboots)

    "... You're also subject to automatic software updates which may include further license restrictions. But at least there's no product activation, so it's not as bad as it could be...."

    automatic s/w updates ? Solaris 8 ?

    The "reviewer" is totally unqualified. He has no idea of the intended use of Sun machines. Nor does it seem he has ever worked on one. Comparing it with 32bit desktops is like comparing a car with a humvee.. Sure the former beats it in speed [hummer goes max ~80mph)..but in real life, especially when you are being bombarded ...humvee is the way to go.

  • Sun Blade Clarification (Score:4, Insightful)

    by arrianus ( 740942 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:58PM (#8011605)
    One thing to bear in mind is that this is a Blade.

    The Blade is Sun's low-end series of machines. They are not fast. They are not reliable. I've seen a fair number of the SunBlade 100s overheat and die. I've had one Blade die over and over and over again. They have low-grade IDE hard drives, and the rest of the system is of comparable quality. There isn't any Sun magic in there to prevent the industry-standard low-end IDE drive or low-end PSU from failing, and the Sun components of the system are of comparable quality (in some cases, of comparable quality to an eMachine). Anyone who tells you otherwise is either clueless or trying to sell you something.

    A high-end x86 machine will blow away these Blades on almost every benchmark, and cost a lot less. This model Sparc has higher IPC than an x86, but not 3x higher, and more than 3x lower MHz.

    The reliability advantages of the Sun's come on higher-end machines. The throughput advantages come on higher-end machines. All of the standard advantages people have cited in this forum come from higher-end machines. Someone mentioned large databases -- the Blade 1500 only supports 4GB of RAM, and beyond that you're swapping to IDE. No performance boost there.

    These machines are engineered for cost -- not speed, not reliability, not network throughput, not memory bandwidth, not upgradeability, and not anything else. We've bought Blades for just under a grand. When you consider how much more it costs to have your own custom-made CPU, motherboard, chipset, case, etc, without the advantages of mass-production, that's very, very cheap.

    However, sometimes you need a Sun. Over here, we have some very high-end Suns (64 CPU machines, etc.). We have a lot of custom software that only runs on Suns. A lot of mainstream engineering applications do not have GNU/Linux ports, and we really don't want to be touching Windows. Having the network standardized to the same type of machine, and having everyone standardized to the same software helps a lot. This is one place where the low-end Suns fit in. You don't buy them because they are faster or better than an x86. You buy them because the high-end suns are faster and better than an x86, and it's often convenient to have matching low-end machines on your network.

  • Article summary for those too lazy to read it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by oingoboingo ( 179159 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:26PM (#8011711)
    Sun sent me a Blade 1500 to review. It's real ugly, and doesn't have much space for expansion. Apart from that it's just a PC. With an UltraSPARC IIIi CPU in it mind you, but with a $75 consumer grade Seagate IDE hard drive and a DVD drive from a 3rd tier supplier. Your mother's Dell has higher specced components in it.


    It runs kind of OK I guess, about as fast as a 1.8GHz Pentium 4, which for comparison no-one would consider buying for a new PC these days. The Blade 1500 is faster than the Blade 150, but then again so is my Palm PDA. If your vendor still hasn't ported your application to Linux, then this workstation might make some sense while you wait for them to do it. If you're not a Sun shop, this won't interest you. If you *are* a Sun shop, then this will be an adequate last Sun workstation for you before you head off into the x86/Linux arena in 2005/2006.


    Take a loving look at your SparcStation 20 you've got stashed away in the basement...they don't make them like they used to.

  • Did the author not RTFPR? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by grahamlee ( 522375 ) <graham.iamleeg@com> on Sunday January 18, 2004 @04:13AM (#8012515) Homepage Journal

    You'd expect someone reviewing a computer to have at least a vague clue about that computer...unfortunately life doesn't always live up to expectations.

    The SunPCI III is, I think, the primary selling point of the Blade 1500 -- it's what separates this workstation from the proprietary competition by essentially combining an UltraSPARC and an IA32 machine into one unit with full binary compatibility for both architectures.

    Following on from...

    The proprietary 64-bit workstation market is dominated by Sun Microsystems

    All very nice. Except that the UltraSPARC is not a proprietary 64-bit system! The SPARC series of chips are developed by SPARC [sparc.com], in whom Sun have a relatively large stake. Such chips include the Leon2 [sparc.org], the designs for which are available under the conditions of the Lesser GPL. This is not a proprietary architecture! Want to make your own SPARC chip? Download the SPARC definitions [sparc.com] and get to it! No-one's going to stop you, this is after all an open system!

    OK, so there's one thing in there that does make the Blade workstation proprietary, and that's the IA-32 compliant processor on the hardware PC emulator. That's a closed-license design, not nice and open and standards-compliant like the SPARCs are.

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