[rescue] SunBlade 2000 vs SunBlade 2500 vs Ultra 45

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 04:04:49PM +0200, Andrew Gaylard wrote:
>This is mostly due to my dislike of AIX, and some bad experiences
>while a customer of IBM; the POWER chips aren't really the problem.
>And as I said, there's more to buying systems than raw performance
>(if it were, then why's Alpha dead and gone now?)

AIX is alive and well, it's just not a big player in the cheap server wars.

The idea of cheap computers running Power has sort of died, Motorola 
Semconductor (now called FreeScale) is much happier making 68000 chips
(and still does) than doing anything complex like the 68060 or the PPC
chips for Apple. They never were able to get a G5 chip in any usable
quantity. 

IBM produced the G5 chips for Apple, and low power is not one of the things
they care about (or could/would do). So there never were any G5 laptops.

The processors they make for game consoles are souped up low level PPC chips
which in raw computing power will never compete with IBM Power computers.
According to a friend who specializes in performance and multiprocessor systems,
the PS/3 is designed to work at no more than 85% CPU utilization. Beyond that
it overheats and starts to have other problems.

IBM I understand is quite happy, they are selling lots of their low end chips
and Power computers are doing well. You just won't see either of them running
Linux or being sold for $200 at Wal-Mart. :-)


As for alpha, it mutated into Itanium. I don't know whether to add a smiley
or a frown (frowny?) onto that one.


>Anyway, this probably isn't rescue-related.  I'm sorry if I've triggered
>a flame-war.  I simply wanted to say that I'm pretty sure that SPARC's
>got legs yet.

No, it probably should go to geeks.

Geoff.


-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM