Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 27th Aug 2008 22:13 UTC, submitted by rom508
OSNews reader rom508 sent us a note that apparently, Sun has ceased selling all of its UltraSPARC-based workstations, with only their x86 workstation offerings remaining. The Ultra 25 and Ultra 45 workstations, both UltraSPARC-based, are still listed on Sun's website, but are marked as 'end-of-life', with the notice that they are "superceded by the next generation Sun Ultra 24 Workstation [x86]". One must wonder if this means the end of Sun's UltraSPARC workstation line. As a proud owner of an indestructible Ultra 5, I must say, that would be rather sad.
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Member since:
2007-04-20
What advantages/disadvantages offer one compared to the other?
It depends on what you do with it. High-end SPARC hardware costs a lot, so x86 will be cheaper, there is also more software for x86, you could run Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS, etc + the applications that come with each OS.
People like you and me, usually get low-end SPARC hardware, which is cheap and slow. One advantage is the price, if you don't play 3D games and don't do heavy multimedia work, then the low-end SPARC will be OK for general desktop use. A few years ago I paid about $200 for Ultra 10 + extras like SCSI hard disks etc., which is as much as I'm willing to spend on computer hardware at the moment. My Ultra 10 runs NetBSD + kde-3.5.9 and it's very usable for browsing internet, reading email, playing mp3s and some light digital photography applications like Gimp and digiKam.
If you're a developer, SPARC makes a good development machine. It's a 64-bit big-endian architecture with strict memory alignment rules. Sometimes sloppy C/C++ code will run on x86, but try it on SPARC and the program will crash. This is good for finding bugs and making sure you don't access or dereference datatypes in an unsafe manner.
If you're interested in operating system design and want to develop and small OS of your own, SPARC assembly is much easier to work with than x86, it's a much saner instrucation set architecture. It's a RISC architecture, it has more registeres than x86 and one aspect of SPARC architecture is the windowed registers for passing function arguments. This allows most function arguments to be passed via registers inside CPU instead of via a stack in main memory. This is why SPARC at 400MHz is much more efficient than a similar x86 machine at 400MHz
Of cause the new x86 processors from Intel and AMD are way faster than any SPARC on low-end. It's a shame Sun are not making much effort to catch up (performance and price). Still I think SPARC is a nice architecture and hopefully there is future for it, Sun's new multicore processors and the upcoming Rock are looking pretty good.
Edited 2008-08-28 12:01 UTC