alt Hacker NewsThe idea anyone would be running a Sparc in 2007 for performance . . .
Some time around 2003 my boss had a Sparc machine as his desktop, though this was widely viewed as unix nerd nostalgia even then. As a junior I got a PC. It turned out my PC built the project 5x faster than the Sparc managed. After this I don’t think we bought much from Sun except one of those big tape drives, and lots of Dell servers appeared instead.
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Around that time I was working as a Solaris admin, C/C++ systems programmer and software packager, our manager gifted us all a SunBlade 1000 in my final year there, although we all used Windows laptops for our day to day work.
I got blank look when I asked "why?". Sure they were snappy, and you could run StarOffice on them, but really there wasn't a lot that they were useful for in our day to day work. Nice machines to be sure, but completely extraneous. I already had a fleet of Sparc build servers running everything from Solaris 2.5.1 through 2.9 which I used to build and package open source stuff for our corp servers. Turned out there were just some leftover funds at the end of the financial year in our departments budget and he had to spend it somewhere.
I'm sure this end-of-the-line machine had its merits. But if you want the cool of Elvis before he got fat, go back to when a SPARCstation 1 running SunOS 4 was new.
The contemporary PC running MS-DOS or early Windows was just a toy by comparison.
Solaris' strength was handling jobs under memory pressure and still working, in a way that 2007 Linux would not; however RAM was dropping in price at the time and this wasn't much of a concern as a result, for desktops at least.
Sparc is not for performance, particularly for benchmarks. BTW, even Linux lose benchmarks to windows often times.
We used a Sparc Ultra 10 for a Authentication server in 2000, it supports concurrent 100K users without any issue, obviously you need to write your own software, but the server is super stable. And yes, we use cheap x86 + Linux for all sorts of thing from 1996 and it was quite faster but you can not trust it the same way as a Sparc.
The funny thing is that this is precisely what SPARC did to the VAX.
While I'm sure they had their use case, the Sun desktops we had while at university in the early 2000s always felt sluggish.
The servers didn't seem much better. They'd handle a ton of users, but each would get the same slow experience.
At my first job in 1997 I convinced my manager to put Linux x86 boxes on everyone's desks and move the Suns to the server room. The Suns required expensive Sun monitors while we could put cheaper larger higher resolution monitors on a Linux x86 box and display everything over X11. I was in the semiconductor / chip design business and everything ran on Solaris until around 2003 when the 64-bit Opteron came out and we never bought a Sun again.
I developed cross-platform simulator software back in 2008. One of our platforms was SPARC. Still used heavily at the time. They tried to replace them with SGI Itanium servers and we know how that turned out.
I had a Sun as my desktop until 2010 when my Solaris admin gig was eliminated. It was running KDE on three displays. Loved it.
Yeah - my AlphaServer DS25, which is five years older and has dual 1 GHz Alpha CPUs, can keep up quite well in many regards with a dual 1.5 GHz Sun Fire V245 (which is very similar to the Sun machine here).
As I recall in also exactly 2002 to 2003 my desktop setup shifted to a x86 whitebox PC I built myself (32-bit) FreeBSD machine that was running X and KDE2. I had a really nicely customized KDE2 setup and could do a lot with it. It was worlds better than a proprietary OS based Unix-like setup.
This was especially true for workloads that were hard to parallelize. Stuff that lent itself well to parallel execution was sometimes faster, though hyperthreads and multicore single-package CPUs took care of that a few years later.
SparcOS was an awesome unix. Linux was respectable as well, but the hardware story in 2007 was much more shitty. Hardware vendors pretty much ignored linux, going for windows as I recall.
So if you just wanted a good Unix environment, SparcOS was it.
Java/ZFS were both Sun products, and we're still using them today. Just not SparcOS. Sun tried with Project Indiana, but they were getting outpaced by Linux and the open source movement.
This is part of the reason why Linux ate their lunch. For the price of one Sun server, you could get 4 Dell servers that ran Linux, and they were faster. Granted, you didn't have all of the redundancy that was built into these higher end Sun systems or the really good support, but hey you had 3 extra machines as a backup.