Ultra Sparc III based workstation finally revealed!

[Sunner]

<<
Excalibur

750 MHz UltraSPARC III (2)
Up to 8 GB SDRAM
Fibre-Channel disk system
3 x 33 MHz PCI
1 x 66 MHz PCI
2 x UPA (Video)
2 x IEEE-1394 (Firewire)
4 x USB
10/100/1000Mbit Ethernet >>



Yummy, I want me one of those

Cant wait to see what the servers are gonna be like

 

[RagingGuardian]

And what are you gonna do with it? Play some Q3 ormaybe some UT? That system is way out of our leagues. Not even the Anand servers are that powerful.

 

[pm]

Do we have Spec results for it? How much will it cost?

The UltraSparc line has been steadily losing the performance race against Compaq's Alpha (Int and FP), Intel's Pentium III (Int), AMD's Athlon (Int), and HP's PA-RISC (FP) to name just a few. The fact that they have been selling them so well is more due to their amazing marketing team, and their ability to sell &quot;solutions&quot; rather than simply selling systems. The systems themselves, however, are not that impressive (IMO) from either a performance perspective or from a cost/performance perspective when compared with similar offerings from HP, IBM and Compaq.

 

[pm]

Raging: there are plenty of computing professionals who frequent this board, not to mention those of us who are simply curious about &quot;state of the art&quot; computing.



I found Spec scores and, at first glance, they are definitely impressive. They are here

I say &quot;at first glance&quot; because an article at EBN states that the 900MHz part won't ship until 1Q 2001 - there's no mention of availability that I could find at Sun's site. There is a link to buy a 5 limited edition systems on E*B*a*y on their page (link here) - they are bidding currently in the $5k -> $6k range.

Anyway, this table compares currently shipping parts with a CPU that won't be available for at least two more quarters. By that time all three of the non-Sun competitors in the table will be shipping faster parts - the EV68 from Compaq, the Pentium IV from Intel, and I'm sure HP must have something coming down the pipeline although I don't know what it is. So that tarnishes the score comparison at Ace's a little, but they are still impressive scores.

Not that Sun has ever needed a performance lead over their competitors to sell tons of workstations....

 

[Rand]

Aceshardware has some spec numbers for the Ultra Sparc III, it looks pretty good. I'll be interested to see how long it takes them to get decent availability for the 900MHz part.

 

[odog]

<< , and I'm sure HP must have something coming down the pipeline although I don't know what it is >>



pm was that an attempt at sarcasm?

 

[shabby]

You guys should see the sparc III, its so huge and heavy compared to the older sparc II's. It looks badass

 

[Sunner]

Actually Ragin, thats a workstation, not a server.

And like pm said, not all the people here are full time gamers.

 

[Goi]

Its not really THAT powerful, but then again it can't be compared directly to the x86 machines that Anand's servers use since they're totally different ISA's and run different applications. Based on spec scores however, its neck to neck with current high end x86 machines in integer scores, but much better in floating point, which have always been the hallmarks of RISC based machines without the kludge of the x86 floating point stack, but a flat register file model.

The difference is in reliability. SUN workstations/servers are arguably the most reliable and stable in the world, not only compared to x86 machines, but to other manufacturers as well(HP, Alpha, SGI, IBM, etc). Also, many applications are optimized, or at least support SUN more, as its the defacto platform for many applications. They are, after all, the &quot;dot in dotcom&quot;

That being said, you probably won't be able to play Q3 on it at all despite there being a Solaris Quake3 port. Their graphics performance is sorely lacking. I think their top of the line graphics cards are the Elite M6, which are dual board Elite M3s. These go way back at least 4 years ago(I remember reading about them and drooling over their power back in 96 when the V2 wasn't even out).

 

[Sunner]

Supposedly Sun is gonna make a fresh attempt of grabbing a share of the GFX market again, they're rumored to be developing new products targeted specifically at the 3D visualization market.

 

[Goi]

Hmmn, apparently they finally have a new graphics board out since the Elite m6. Their new Expert3D appears to be marginally better than the Elite m6 in most areas(at least from their own performance benchmarks). 6Million triangles/s and 143MPixels/s should play Quake3 decently if it even works

 

[BenSkywalker]

No ViewPerf scores?

 

[Goi]

Actually, there ARE ViewPerf scores Benwalker, but they're nothing awe-inspring. Beats the crap out of my V3 though
Here they are...
The Elite m6 was their old flagship graphics solution, the Expert3D is their new one.

Ultra 60 450MHz/Sun Elite m6
ProCDRS-02 : 19.1
DX-05: 31.2

Ultra 60 450MHz/Sun Expert3D
ProCDRS-02 : 23.7
DX-05: 36.2

Ultra 80 450MHz/Sun Elite m6
ProCDRS-02 : 19.0
DX-05: 28.7

Ultra 80 450MHz/Sun Expert3D
ProCDRS-02 : 23.7
DX-05: 36.2