[geeks] Apple vs. Sun

[Chris Hedemark]

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On Wednesday, November 6, 2002, at 11:49 AM, Dave McGuire wrote:

>   On this point we agree.

I'll have to remember this momentous occasion.

> I'll add to it by saying "a lot of STUPID people" who don't understand 
> that MHz != performance.

Correct.

>   No pun intended, but this is apples and oranges.

Yes.  They are not directly comparable, but it doesn't take an EE to 
see that there is a vast difference in the quality and performance of 
these two machines.

> The architectures are completely different.

Yep.

> There's no guarantee (or even suggestion) that there's 1:1 
> correspondence in cache size vs. performance benefit.

If anything, I was trying to find something to make the Sun win in 
certain areas.  It's very hard to do, given the two machines being 
compared.

> In general bigger is better, sure, but the point of diminishing 
> returns and bigger/smaller L2 vs. smaller/bigger L3 will be completely 
> different between architectures with different instruction sets and 
> different ways of referencing memory.  I'm sure you know this.

Yep.

In the end, how appropriately was that Blade 150 priced in comparison 
to other workstations available in its price range?  Not even 
considering Linux PeeCee's.  Look at Apple's offerings.  It won't be 
too long before you see more & more UNIX apps moving to the OS X 
platform.  Probably the major thing holding that up is the proprietary 
GUI.  If Apple starts bundling an X11 server with an Aqua-fied window 
manager, this could change.

Probably one of the other big things keeping Apple out of some of these 
traditional UNIX applications is that they only have relatively low end 
offerings.  You can't do any better with Apple than a dual CPU system.  
Also large memory configurations aren't supported yet.  So the 
architecture doesn't scale like UltraSPARC.  But they have some pretty 
compelling kit down at the desktop workstation level.

Chris Hedemark
Hillsborough, NC
http://yonderway.com


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