Sun

What, it's not like US CPUs had a totally different architecture. They still had a FSB, no point to point topology, a northbridge and a southbridge, so there's nothing particularly special about the system architecture.

Externally they are similar, but the thing that is quite unique to the SPARC is its registry architecture (not many processors implement the concept of register windows, definitely not x86). The new T series CPUs look like an interesting architecture, much different from the what Intel offers.

The concept of register windows ended up being a hinderance for SPARC when trying to scale the architecture for out-of-order operation (In a similar fashion as the branch delay slot was for MIPS).

The main highlight of SPARC IMHO is that it is a truly open architecture, i.e. the ISA is in the public domain as a IEEE standard. A pity that not that many vendors based their micros around it.

What do you guys think about expanding Sun Blade 150 or Sun Ultra 60?

I'm just trying to find optimal balance for pretty much powerful cpu (i can not let myself to have ultra 25/45 as they cost > $4000) and ability to extension.

Also, what do you think, is it possible to fire up Ultra 45 with modern ATi videocard? (just dreaming and wondering )

Thanks for replies

Both of those will likely have disk bottlenecks (60 has Ultra/Wide SCSI, 150 has not-so-good IDE). I'd look at the Blade 1000,1500,2000,2500 series if you can swing them. Not SATA/SAS like the 25/45, but def. faster/better HW.

The Blade 1000 uses FC-AL drives. Are the so much better when it comes to bandwidth?

UltraSCSI does 40MB/Sec, 1Gb FC-AL does 100MB/sec. The Blade 1k/2k has improved memory technology, faster CPUs, and so it's likely that you will see an improvement.

FWIW my Ultra-10 440/1GB RAM is not too impressive, even with a SCSI system disk.

Hmm, I just installed FreeBSD on a disk in my Blade 1k, maybe I should run a benchmark on the disk.

Thanks for replies!

What do you think about Sun Blade 150 ? Is it too weak for Solaris 10? I've heard that this machine does not like Gnome in the terms of the work speed.
Just accidently found one at the eBay and still wondering (in my case, delivery to Ukraine will cost me $160 ) — http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sun-Microsystem ... 15f2d#shId

$160 is a lot of postage for a Blade 150, but it may be the smallest self-contained unit (with Video) with an USII processor.

Also a 150 should cost you $50 max... $150 is way too expensive!

The 150 is a slow machine, I believe it has the USIIi 650 and IDE disk(s).

I would look for a Blade 1000/2000, available on eBay for around $50 (UK eBay) and postage from UK->UKR shouldn't be really expensive. One UK seller was selling Blade 2000's with 1GB and 9GB Drives recently for UK £20 + postage ....

Basically the 150 is nyet bistro!

I have some V100's/V120's with Solaris 10 U9, this machine with a network connection to a PC is a far better solution (using something like VNC, or NoMachine NX) - the same CPU in the V120 as the Blade 150, but 15K disks can give it a boost in performance.

The Blade 150 really isn't worth anything more than $25-$50 in my opinion. Although the higher-end version has a 650MHz US IIi processor, I've found that Solaris 10 desktop performs about the same on a 650MHz Blade 150 as a 450MHz Ultra 60. The 550MHz chip (or the 500MHz in the Blade 100) are just too slow for Gnome. The extremely limited cache of the Sun Blade 100/150 processors is crippling, so although 650MHz sounds good on paper, it's not going to perform nearly as well as a US II with 4MB cache.

With that being said, the Blade 150 does have a few things going for it, and it makes a great little web server. Here are the pros/cons as I see them:

PROS

• very low power consumption. My 650MHz pulled 42W at full load, and went down to 26W after idling for a while. A Blade 1000, by comparison, pulls 210W (single proc) or 280W (dual proc).
• very compact, and only weighs 35lb. Blade 1000 weighs over twice as much.
• reasonably good case design, so it's easy to upgrade/mod compared to the Ultra 10
• very quiet, but the Blade 1000 is also quiet (if you have Solaris installed)
• has USB and an onboard framebuffer

CONS

• it's slow. Solaris 10 + JDS (Gnome) run, but not very well. It's much better suited to running S10 headless
• only takes up to 2GB memory (bad for Solaris 10+ZFS), and it takes unregistered ECC RAM which is harder to come by than fully buffered, ECC
• ATA/66 (I think) controller is slow (faster than the Ultra 10 by a lot), and it can only address 128GB of space per disk. If you are feeling adventurous, you can buy ATA/100 controllers that are Solaris compatible, but they aren't bootable.
• its peripheral PCI bus is 32-bit, 33MHz which means you really can't upgrade storage controllers. Various Ultra3 and FC HBAs are compatible, but the underlying system architecture is just not designed for high throughput

I guess what it boils down to is remembering that the Blade 100 and 150 were cheap machines. I think there was a time when Sun priced them at sub-$1000, and people got what they paid for. They're now 7-10 year old machines, so I think paying over $100 for one is really not worth it.

That being said, I just paid $50 for a 375MHz RS/6000 43p, so it might be worth it to you.

For a number of these type of systems a small server is the way to go - many of them have memory restrictions that, while reasonable for a few users, wind up not working under heavy workload (think O300's 4GB limit), or otherwise have been retired but are still working and were sold in much higher numbers then the later workstations. V210s and V240s are reasonable now, for instance.

A bit more work, but not too bad.

V210's on UK eBay sometimes fail to fetch a BIN price of $100 or so. The V240 maybe around 20% or so more. Things are getting better though as 1500/2500 Silvers are sometimes now put on by sellers with "best offers" (meaning they either have no clue of pricing or just want to shift the box).

I really like my 1500 "Red", since purchasing 8 months ago it has been on mostly 24/7, and even with 1GB, it is a nice dual 120+80GB ZFS based web development platform (with CoolStack) - and its quiet.

If anybody has the latest PROM for the Blade 1500 red I'd appreciate it. I still run with the 2003 original PROM! The new PROM would allow me to use some spare 1GB sticks I have which don't work with the old PROMS....

Their isn't a day where I don't curse Oracle believe me. Thank god I have the last Sun Internal partner edition of the System Handbook on DVD...

Although this is an old thread, things have been happening fast since last year.

V440, 480 and 490's (even those with Quad US IV) are now around $100-150 in the UK, and I see T1000's 8-core 2x73GB (20+ by one seller) on sale for around $350 with NO interest!

It seems the SPARC market has crashed somewhat with prices tumbling.

I am considering a V490 4 x 1.35Ghz USIV 16Gb Ram 1 x146Gb for less than $120, there is even another less specified for $40(!) - the postage is more - but luckily the guy is 20 minutes drive from me.

But is the noise that bad and is the power consumption huge?

Yes, they're noisy but at a lower pitch than your V210. Kind of like driving at the ton with the windows down in the summer.

The 1U servers are usually pretty shrill since the fans run about 17,000 RPM and only 3-4K on the V440/480/490. The 4-bangers make a LOT of heat. I have 2 440s under my desk and they blast my legs like a car heater...great for the winter but intolerable the rest of the year. And they're not faster for most workloads than your V210. If you are going to run it all the time you better have a set of hearing protectors and some serious air conditioning. Otherwise buy another V210. They're the best value for the money as far as I am concerned. I have a stack of V210s with the dual 1.34GHz CPUs like yours and they're plenty fast enough for me. If you want faster I think both they and the V440/X can go up to 1.5GHz but they may need an additional cooling upgrade from what I read. On the V440 both PSUs must run because it requires both fans for cooling. So it is noisy and hot and consumes power even though theoretically more than one PSU is redundant. Somebody check me on it but I think the 480/490 have 4 PSUs and that will probably be worse.

For a development box the 2 socket V210 is hard to beat in the SPARC world. If it doesn't have to be a server, then an Ultra80 is probably worth looking at. It's a lot easier to live with in terms of noise and power and heat but of course it is a lot slower, too.

Thanks.

In the end I went with a T1000. Basically V100 size, light, fast, low power with 8-core/32-thread, 8GB, 2x73GB SAS.

Cost me $300 on eBay offer (cheap for US, real cheap for UK) and will attempt to replace the V210 as my primary server.

Actually was amazed how small and light the T1000's actually are.

Really looking forward to getting it running (but NOT looking forward to jumpstart, as it has NO CD/DVD drive or USB!).

Congrats, let us know how you like it. I could use a smaller/lighter/more frugal SPARC box too.

As far as I could determine, staying with SPARC I had very few choices if I required better performance than a V210.

I could have gone Quad with the V4XX route (V490, 4xUSIV, 16GB, 146GB for $100) but the huge weight, size, noise and power consumption made this box (originally I believe $90,000) not ideal for me even at $100. A Dual V490 (=4 cores) with 16GB/No Disk was $50 including shipping - basically they were giving it away.

So it was the T1000, or stay at USIIIi 1.6GHZ x 2.

I'll benchmark but my feeling from reading the web comments is that single-threaded the USIIIi will beat the T1 easily, but once the T1 multi-threads it can even beat the V490 at high loads (not sure if I can believe that though).

As a rough and ready rule I'll assume The T1 can perform similarly to a low-end Quad core Intel at best and at worse will still be better than Dual USIIIi at 1.6GHZ. That will be more than enough for me at the moment.

Also of course the T series can run Solaris 11... unlike even the USIV....

Has anyone played with vizserver on "cheap" (sub $2k) sun workstations? Is it usable?

My max'ed out Ultra 10 would certainly have adequate hardware-accelerated graphics processing capability ― with an Elite 3D-M6 (UPA) board installed ― for anything requiring or recommending OpenGL. If I had the means to try it (i.e. having the software at my disposal), I would definitely try it. (I actually haven't used this system seriously in a while, I'm actually thinking of parting with it. Maybe some interesting software might persuade me otherwise.)