Sun Ultra 24 Workstation

Sun's Brian Healy discusses the benefits and features of Sun's new Sun Ultra 24 Workstation.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Sun
• Microsystems
• Ultra
• 24
• workstation
• Healy

[nightowl8936]

Several reasons.

Intel CPU/chipset allows for multiple operating system support. SPARC is Linux and Solaris.

UltraSPARC T2 is NOT the best choice for workstation processor because many workstation applications are single threaded and need to run as fast as possible. Traditional "fat" Intel processors with large caches do this best.

Web servers which have many dozens of asynchronous independent threads are much better suited for the particular multicore chip that Sun made due to design.

[maxx666mayhem]

I recently brought a sun ultrasparcx64 sun workstation and it's way faster than my friends intel quad core sun workstation

[olwsiked2324]

We have about 60 of these Ultra 24s computers at our school, running RAID 0 w/ 6GB of memory and they're pretty nice. Sun, MAY have had a good idea using Intel and I think they would've been a cheaper, competitive, alternative to Dell. BUT, Oracle bought them and now they suck. Try getting ANY help through the ORACLE website. Oracle support SUCKS! Too bad Sun... goodbye to you.

[Kevitivity]

If you want to burn money, but Sun.

[kwg2005]

why buy a sun computer with X86 hardware? Might as well buy a Dell for much less.

[nightowl8936]

The one advantage of being able to run Windows, Linux, BSD, and Solaris on Sun-branded PC hardware is that a company or group can buy ONE type of hardware for engineering, marketing, etc, and can run the OS that is most familiar to each group of people, but run ONE standard hardware platform.

Thats very useful. You can scale the hardware up or down as well. Dual core for the marketing people. Quad core for the designers and engineers.

Sun is a good company. Smart engineering and marketing.

[nightowl8936]

(2)

The other thing is HARDWARE support for scientific computing. That means FLOATING POINT. As I recall about the T1, it has precisely ONE floating point unit that is shared among all 8 cores, because web servers are mostly integer, so it would not be used much in that role.

If the T2 has at least 1 floating point unit PER CORE, thats better.

But there still remains the same old problem of the "von Neumann" bottleneck. CPUs will be starved for lack of memory bandwidth, w/o big caches.

[nightowl8936]

(1)

"But aren't there important scientific computation problems that parallelize?"

Yes, of course, BUT, the application software needs to be written to take advantage of whatever OS services there are to take advantage of that parallelism.

Usually people talk about process-level or thread-level parallelism, BUT the difference between web server threads and scientific ones is that each web server thread is independent, so it does not require shared memory or message queues between them.

[mike4ty4]

"Intel CPU/chipset allows for multiple operating system support. SPARC is Linux and Solaris."

Don't forget BSD systems as well. That's 3 types of operating system. What else do you get on Intel CPU for OS? Micropiss Winduhs, a crap OS.

"Web servers which have many dozens of asynchronous independent threads are much better suited for the particular multicore chip that Sun made due to design."

But aren't there important scientific computation problems that parallelize?

[nightowl8936]

Please elaborate for us... which models of machine are we talking about?

And what software are you running that shows this speed improvement?

How much faster? 25%? 50%?

[mike4ty4]

And they're using INTEL processors in there? Why not make an EIGHT-core box with Sun's very own UltraSPARC T2 Niagara RISK processor???