Sun's New Workstations and Graphics Cards

An anonymous reader "Sun Microsystems has released the Sun Blade 2000 workstation, along with a new graphics accelerator, the XVR-1000. This could very well give SGI's lineup a run for its money in the CAD and Visualization fields, although its fillrate and 38-bit colour may make it less desirable for animation. Make sure to check out Ace's article. " (page down a couple times to read it)

Re:38 - bit color

[sien]

From the Ace's article:

Like the Wildcat II series we have reviewed in the past, the XVR-1000 is targetted towards the workstation market, and as such, there is a great deal of emphasis on image quality and accuracy. The board features 38-bit RBGA color (30-bit RGB + 8-bit Alpha), a 116-bit framebuffer, and 26-bit floating-point Z buffer.

The Z buffer precision might actually be of use. There are people who do visualisation who care about this stuff. As for the color, does anyone know if you can actually see any difference there ? I mean - 24 bit color is 16M colors ?

Re:Sunblade line is very poor

[theCURE]

You can not compare the PC based sunblade 100 with the blade 2k (or even the sunblade 1000). The sunblade 100 is a cheap pc104 box, the 2000 is an extremely high end machine, more comparable to the high-end Ultra's. The sunblade 100's are extremely low end sun's and are GREAT for what they cost and what you get. The only thing i see the same besides the name is that they are both workstations.

If my blade 100 would stop crashing, i'd have some better things to say about it.

SUN HAS BEEN 64 BIT FOR YEARS

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been 2 years since I installed a 32bit cpu or processor in the data center.

Re:38 - bit color

[LinuxParanoid]

Sun still has some customers in the 2D publishing space, who might use images scanned in or color-corrected with greater bit-depth precision.

And theoretically, texturing-intensive entertaiment applications could use it for better results when blending multiple textures. But practically, fill rate is probably not strong enough for those guys to buy the XVR-1000.

Basically, I think it's a penis-comparison match versus PC graphics. "My color depth is bigger than yours." Which Sun hopes will justify the higher price.

It may hit a few niches, but its mostly irrelevant.

--LP, who no longer knows the 3D gory details but still faintly remembers where the bodies are buried

2x the performance for 10x the price

[Animats]

This is a graphics board that costs $3400. It's a nice graphics board. It has 360MB of memory on board, 10-bit color, and supports two large monitors. But all those things don't justify it costing 10x the price of the current NVidia GEforce boards. It's only a little better than the best gamer cards. Also, it doesn't seem to have enough fill rate to update its monitors at full speed.

The low end really has eaten the high end in graphics hardware. Five years ago, the $1000 boards outperformed the $100 boards by an order of magnitude or more, because the high-end boards had hardware Z-buffers, geometry hardware (the 4x4 matrix multiplier), and hardware texture and lighting support. Today, low-end 3D boards have all that; the high-end boards just have a bit more of everything.

The cost probably reflects about $400 in parts, and millions in engineering cost divided by the few hundred of these boards Sun will sell. That's a losing business proposition.

Sun also announced a 24" high-resolution flat-panel monitor. Any info on that?

SPARC a faster CPU? I don't think so.

[Namarrgon]

As for raw compute performance, if you believe Sun's SPEC ratings from their product site, a 1.05GHz SPARC CPU is only just lagging behind an Intel 2.2GHz PIV on integer performance and beating it on FP.

Where do they claim that? According to the SPECcpu website, a 1.05 GHz SPARC III Cu gets 537 [spec.org] base SPECint and 701 [spec.org] SPECfp, while a 2.2 GHz P4 easily beats it with 790 [spec.org] SPECint and 779 [spec.org] SPECfp.

Intel is way ahead in integer, and although the Sun catches up somewhat in FP, if you look at the individual results, it's entirely due to one massive spike on the art test. They recently figured out a (controversial [aceshardware.com]) compiler trick that gave them nearly an order of magnitude increase on that one SPECfp test, and doubled their overall SPECfp score. Sun are known for their stability & scalability, but not their CPU speed.

Of course, if you have 106 [sun.com] of the things, that's different. But you'll be paying over US$4M for it, which isn't exactly workstation class anymore.

Re:What are these still used for?

[pmz]

Why do some people choose to race BMWs instead of Dodge Neons? Why do some people choose brand-name Swiss Army knives over cheap knockoffs?

The high-end Sun workstations are well-rounded well-engineered computational workhorses. PCs just fall short in overall system flexibility, CPU cache size, I/O bandwidth, hardware errata, ease of maintainence, tight OS support, firmware, ECC, ... you name it.

Sun workstations are useful until they are physically broken. From the engineering desktop to the printer server, it is common for a Sun box to go ten years before being decommissioned. How many ten year old PCs are still useful doing real work? Not many.

In general, the RISC-based computers from Sun, SGI, IBM, etc., can just be pushed harder, worked longer, and still be standing long after the PCs were abandoned and donated to schools.

Re:What are these still used for?

[outx992]

"as for pc's, NOBODY is doing large model work on them".

Actually, yes, many companies, including the one I'm consulting for are switching to PC's for large geometry loads. Our test and evaluation guys are getting Win2K boxes on a daily basis. These machines in real benchmarks run faster than the Sun/SGI/HP machines. Some substantially faster.

Most major software vendors are porting their CAD applications to PC's, because that's where the money is.

There are a few bigger companies out there who are refusing to make the switch, but give 'em 10 years or so. As their competition saves a million dollars a year because they switched to PC's, they'll start to take notice...

Re:What are these still used for?

[Anonymous Coward]

To a Ford or a GM, a million a year is nothing compared to the increased administrative costs of NT compared to UNIX.

Also, those guys get great prices on their systems.

Sun Blade vs SGI Fuel

[lweinmunson]

Looks like the two may be comparable. The Fuel costs about $11,000 for a R14K 600 model. I think that the Fuels v12 graphics may have the edge here, but for slightly lower end stuff, I can see companies going with Sun (We know they'll be around in 5 years) instead of SGI for some of their MCAD stuff.