Re: UltraSparc Power?
The main difference between a Sparc system as compared to a Intel is the bus
architecture. While Intel uses a shared bus approach which does experience quite a
few bottle necks when running multiple applications especially graphics along with
cpu intensive I/O. Sun uses a cross bar switch bus architecture vs a shared bus.
The UPA bus in the Ultra Axi runs @ 90MHZ vs 66MHZ on a shared Intel LX Bus. Sun
also provides a separate 72 bit @ 75MHZ UPA bus for the graphics as well compared to
a shared PCI on the Intel.
The UltraSPARC-IIi provides dual 16-kbyte caches, a 64-entry fully-associative MMU,
and a four-channel PCI controller. The UltraSPARC-IIi CPU combines a hardware
floating point unit with a dedicated graphics unit and hardware multimedia
extensions to the instruction set. The VIS multimedia extensions piggy back on the
floating point hardware, providing special-ized instructions that accelerate pixel
manipulation, imaging, large data transfers, and video decompression,---> moving
data 64 bytes at a time between the CPU, main memory, and display memory<---. This
is why you can not compare MHZ to MHZ when considering a Sparc or Intel box. Also
the Sparc IIi CPU is 64 bit, Intel might have the Merced available in Y2K sometime,
with many bugs and glitches to deal with.
I agree with Steve regarding the disk drive interface on the Ultra 5 & 10 since they
are IDE. But there is a better solution than the Ultra 5 & 10. Have you considered
a workstation based on the Ultra AXi board platform and Ultra Sparc IIi CPU? These
run at 270MHZ, 333, 360 and 400, each system has built in Dual Ultra Wide SCSI,
auto sensing 10/100 Ethernet, six 32bit @33 MHZ PCI slots and supports 1GB max ECC
Dram. There is a less expensive ATi graphics card which you may use instead of the
more costly Creator 2,3 and 6 series. You could buy an Ultra Axi system in the mid
$2000 range depending on your desired configuration.
In my office I have multiple 166 to 233 Intel boxes running Linux which are merely
old fun projects, but when it is time for serious performance I always use the Sparc
boxes which are optimized for Unix not Wintel.
Let me know if you are interested in a Ultra AXi system, I do provide developer
discounts for the Sparc/ Linux community as a professional courtesy.
Regards,
Michael Ciandella
.
Roger Foxcroft wrote:
> Steve Dunham wrote:
>
> > <snip>
> >
> > The graphics are fairly bad. Sun put 2M of video memory in the
> > machine, so you are stuck with 1152x900 in 16-bit mode or 800x600 in
> > 24 bit mode. (You can do higher resolutions in 8-bit mode.)
>
> I've got a 4Mb AGP running 1280x1024 in 16bpp on my Ultra 5/270 - I thought that
> was standard now.
>
> R
>
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