Re: Are Sunblade 1000s slow?
On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 11:17:11PM +0200, Michael Andersen wrote:
> Don't get me wrong, I am pleased to work with Sun hardware daily and I
> use it privately as well - and although the design is more pleasing than
> x86, there is no reason to pretend that the SPARC architecture is the
> fastest today or in the future.
This isn't a comment to Michael directly, I just want to vent, since
we've gotten onto this topic.
I've had this conversation over and over with x86-centric friends, who
simply cannot understand that "fast" is not the be-all end-all of
computing. SPARCs have never been about fast; they are about
load-handling. The SPARC was made for, and grew up in, a multiuser
environment where hundreds or thousands of processes are running at
once. The x86 grew up in single-user machines where the priority has
always been to do whatever the user is looking at as fast as possible.
I do agree, though, that Sun's is just hurting itself by charging
completely ridiculous prices for machines which are *basically*
equivalent to what are considered "high end" servers in the x86
world. The V100 costs $1k, and that's fine, but the v210 costs almost
$6k if you actually want 2 CPUs. That's bad. A mostly-comparable dual
G4 XServe can be had for $2.8k.
I guess, were I an analyst, which I'm not, my analysis would be that
Sun either needs to treat the low-end market like a low-end market or
leave it.
--
Shawn Boyette
mdxi@collapsar.net
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