Re: Help with hardware choices
On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 18:20:25 -0500
Brandon Mercer <nomercy@eutonian.com> wrote:
> I do not know what you're talking about. Sparcs use considerably less
> power, run cooler, last longer, are more stable and are comparable with
> speed.
You've got to be kidding me. Maybe for ancient pre-UltraSPARC boxes,
but my dual-750Mhz SunBlade1000 alone I can hear humming in the very
next room and I don't need any heat in that room because of that machine.
Similarly for my Ultra60.
> Don't confuse clock cycles with speed either.
I'm not at all. I've been maintaining and working on the sparc Linux
ports for at least 10 years. I rewrote the GCC compiler backend for
Sparc from scratch. I wrote all of the instruction scheduling descriptions
in the SPARC backend of GCC.
I'm the only person who has bothered trying to write assembler optimized
code for UltraSPARC in libmpeg and MESA.
It might be possible that I kind of know what I'm talking about when I say
that SPARCs simply aren't a good bang for the buck these days. I know
the hardware inside and out, so given that do you think I'm qualified to
make those statements?
> I've got an old sparcstation 20 with a 60Mhz proc, that performs just as
> well as my Pentium200 for network routing.
Yes, hardware from back in the mid-80's, the glory days of Sun hardware
when it actually was comparable to the x86 offerings of the same time frame.
Some things have changed in the last 15 years :-)
I have a strong vested interest in SPARC doing well, yet I can sit here and
say SPARC really has lost the cpu wars. I wish other Sun/SPARC lovers could
be similarly realistic.
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