[rescue] Sun Ultra5 emulation, was: more sun2 adventures!

[Peter Stokes]

Hi All

Just to put this one to bed and clarify for those who have not had the fun of
testing and shipping several hundred of these over the years.....

In the Uk the pricing (from memory only..) of the U5 was around the #3k mark,
the U10 was around the #5k mark. They both comprised of the same motherboards
of which there were a few. The very early ones p/n 375-0009 run the memory at
60ns only and had lower spec graphics, the rest all run either 60ns or 50ns
depending on the memory. ALL of the motherboards can accommodate ALL of the
CPUs from the 270Mhz to the 440Mhz, just need to make sure the OBP is of a
high enough rev to support the one you want.

The U10 came with 300Mhz (normally with 0009 motherboard), 333Mhz, 360Mhz and
440Mhz, all but the 300Mhz have 2Mb cache. The U10 PSU is more powerful to
cope with 2 hard disks and the UPA graphics which can only be fitted to the
U10 chassis, not the U5. The U5 normally just had 1 hard disk and the only
graphics upgrade was PCI based ones such as PGX32. The U5 came with 270Mhz,
333Mhz, 360Mhz and 400Mhz. Only the 333Mhz and the 400Mhz had 2Mb cache, the
others had much smaller cache 512Kb(?).

The other gotcha was memory. The U5 could only fit up to 512Mb memory rather
than the U10 which could fit 1Gb, though 3rd party kits became available for
the U5 to go to 1Gb or you could lose the floppy assembly and install U10
memory.

Rumour was they were made originally in Taiwan by PC manufacturer and they
were certainly more PC like than old Sun like in structure, but there again
they were #3k/#5k versus a U60 at >#10k.

Performance wise they were a great bang for your buck when introduced. I had a
customer who replaced a loaded SS20 75Mhz doing seismic analysis with a 270Mhz
version and it cut his analysis time down by an order of magnitude if I
remember correctly.

Reliability is certainly not as good as systems such as the U2 etc, which just
go on. The main failure seems to be motherboards, having said that there are
still a lot of them out there doing real work often as front ends for
expensive pieces of kit such as scanners etc.

Peter
---------------------------
Peter Stokes
Ashlyn Computer Services
Mbl: 07977 532320
---------------------------




On 9 Jan 2019, at 00:39, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:

> On 1/8/19 5:31 PM, Andrew Luke Nesbit wrote:
>>> Yep, the 10s tend to be rarer and hence more expensive and will I guess
>>> increase as they become harder to find...
>>
>> Why is this the case?  Is there something about the Ultra 10 in
>> particular that makes them particularly desirable?  Or are they prone to
>> fail more quickly?  What's behind this proposition?  :-)
>
>  The Ultra5 and the Ultra10 are actually both fairly crappy machines,
> as Sun hardware goes.  Among their worse/cheapest/thinnest sheet metal
> designs.  I've accidentally crushed an Ultra10 by putting a
> not-too-heavy box on top of it, whereas fat-ass me can STAND on an
> Ultra2 or an Ultra60 with no ill effects.
>
>          -Dave
>
> --
> Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
> New Kensington, PA
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue