[geeks] Needed: A good sparc workstation

[nate at portents.com]

> I disagree about a $200 PC besting a free Ultra 60, unless you mean
> unimportant things like how many FLOPs it can do.  No amount of power
> savings can equal the cost to my soul.  Oh, and having Solaris JUST
> WORK has to be something.  I see a lot of complaints about NIC and
> SATA problems with PC using Solaris users.

I find this whole conversation kind of odd, frankly... I mean, let's step
back and look at this from a distance, shall we?

Sun SPARC workstation - designed primarily as quality hardware with not
much cost-cutting involved, with an OS and drivers designed primarily for
reliability in mind for large corporate customers.

PC - very very wide range of hardware, from ultra low-cost to high grade,
built on top of a very old platform that still has crufty bits, with
operating systems and drivers that similarly cover a very broad range of
quality (or lack thereof).

Of course the Sun SPARC stuff will have some inherent advantages, but that
doesn't mean that someone can't put together a new PC that works well too
(with some inherent caveats).  It's very likely that it will take more
work to find the right hardware/software combo on the PC side to get
anywhere near the same level of quality and reliability, but it can be
found.  And time could be saved in this area by buying industrial-grade PC
equipment.

For instance, people on this list have complained about the noise and poor
reliability of the fan on the Intel Atom boards, but those same people
could have gone out and paid more for an industrial grade Atom motherboard
from another manufacturer that was entirely passively cooled.  Likewise,
some industrial manufacturers choose to put better NICs than Realtek and
Marvell on their motherboards. You'll pay more of course for such a board,
but people also pay a lot more for "workstations", so it shouldn't be a
surprise to anyone.

I just feel that the PC is too much of an amorphous blob of a "platform"
to make any clear generalizations about it. It really comes down to
whether a person wants to spend their time distilling that amorphous blob
into something useful to them or not.

- Nate