Not too long ago word came out that Sun was preparing the release of two new workstations, one Opteron and the other UltraSPARC, because it had published manuals and pricing. Now, the machines appear to be officially on sale, even though announcements have not been made yet. First of is the Sun Ultra 40, the bigger and badder brother of the Ultra 20. It can handle up to two dual-core Opteron processors, and 16GB of memory. Secondly, we have the Ultra 45, an UltraSPARC IIIi-based workhorse, holding two UltraSPARC IIIi processors at 1.6Ghz each, also capable of 16GB of RAM.
How did I miss this!!!
Been hunting for weeks!
I’ve suggested that Sun has been using this site as an astroturfing platform, and the announcement of new hardware packages pretty much cinches it.
Nobody minds reading about new hardware *PARADIGMS* on a site supposing to be for operating systems, but individual hardware packages is an obvious favouritism.
Come clean, OSNews, or start announcing Dell, MSI, Gateway, Apple, HP, IBM, etc. etc.
They do?
Apple gets this comment every time! Will have to check if you posted on those threads as well.
Dell, MSI and gateway are too boring to get posts.
IBM and HP get posts when they release new cool stuff.
Probably because those offerings are usually quite boring.
I would never bother with those articles, but I took a look at these new systems and drooled over them…
Not everything is a giant conspiracy designed to trick you
You’re back again, and back at your Sun bashing. I really wish you’d just disappear, you take everything Sun-related off-topic and derail the entire conversation. Anybody curious what I’m talking about, look at his comment history.
Since you’re going to generally display paranoia now, in order to do your daily Sun-bashing, I’ll return the favor.
Everybody, Shamen works for Dell, MSI, Gateway, Apple, HP, IBM, and etc! He’s here to bash Sun in order to promote his companies! He’s an evil spy, deliberately sabotaging Sun! Quick everyone, we’d better start submitting articles for every engineer’s birthday at Sun in retaliation! Leave comments bashing Dell, MSI, Gateway, Apple, HP, IBM and etc on EVERY thread related to them! Derail all conversations and take everything completely off topic!
Now that I’ve gotten my daily Shaman-bashing out of the way, good for Sun. I’ve been waiting on the Ultra40 since I got wind of it, Sun makes really well built boxes. I’ll probably be dual booting it, but it’ll be nice to have a machine officially supported by Sun for Solaris. Too many headaches with all these off-the-shelf machines I’ve been trying to evaluate Solaris on.
I’m actually impressed with the pricing too, I wouldn’t touch the 45 with a ten foot pole, but the 40 is a steal as far as I’m concerned for the quality of machine you get. I’m curious to see one in person.
These boxes makes the Netra T1 AC200 I’m bringing back to life look very, very old. 🙂
Actually, the mega-pro-Sun sentiments on this site fly in the face of the general geek populace. If you were on more than one site, you’d know.
See how many comments are on this long-standing site:
http://www.solariscentral.org/
Check out the forum.
Simply put, this site seems to have magically grown a large populace of remarkably pro-Sun people, when the community sites out there dedicated to Sun & Solaris haven’t. If you don’t find that suspect, then I have a bridge or two that I have for sale.
mega-pro-Sun? I do read more than one site, in fact I’m on a fair number of the opensolaris mailing lists as well. I’m also a FreeBSD shop, I’m only evaluating Solaris at this point. I have a lot of negative things to say about the usability experience with Solaris, but a lot of positive things to say about the technical merits of the kernel.
That “long-standing” site you just referenced isn’t worth anything in my opinion. It just rehashes Sun press releases, and various news from this site. No wonder nobody comments there, I’ve visited it once or twice myself, and certainly didn’t comment.
Regardless, your argument is ignorant. So Sun is getting too much attention on OSnews in your opinion? Also, it’s obviously astroturfing since another website doesn’t have many posts on it. (????) I hope you can detect my sarcasm.
I guess that means every time one of the BSD articles gets postive comments (as they mostly seem to do) it must be astroturfing by the EVIL BSD COMPANIES, because bsdnews.com barely has any comments! bsdnews.com has been around a long time! This makes it a BLATENT CASE OF astroturfing.
What on earth is your problem? Did you get fired by Sun for being a dick or something? Your arguments are so non-sensical it’s actually pretty funny to read them. It’s like stepping back in time and watching dodo birds trying to mate with alligators. The dodo birds do their song and dance (your arguments) and then the alligators rip them to shreds (the rebuttles you get to 99% of your posts, by all kinds of people on this site.) They must all be EVIL SUN EMPLOYEES OUT TO ASTROTURF YOU INTO THE GROUND!!!!
Uh, apparently you haven’t been in the software industry long enough to hear the term “astroturfing” or see it in action. It’s OK, I forgive you.
I’m quite aware what it means. I was attempting to create satire based on your actions/words. Sorry if it was over your head. I suppose your only rebuttle is that I don’t know what astroturfing is. Is it your new catch phrase? I think your last 10 posts have contained that term. Please stop derailing all topics. I’d actually like to read intelligent discussion, on topics I’m interested in.
That’s why I ignored 90% of your previous post.
I hope, SUN will have a low end SPARC offering for poor developers like me 🙂 A 1000$ offering for the middle 150 woul be great.
You need SPARC architecture? I feel sorry for you, I doubt they’ll ever offer a low-end SPARC. That’s always been their “high end”. :/ Maybe try a used Sun from eBay or one of the various used Sun equipment sites? That’s probably the best way to get one in the price range you’re looking for, that’s decent enough to actually use. Maybe we’ll see something out of the Sun/Fujitsu thing that’s not as head-snappingly expensive. Oh, and it’ll be an extra bonus if it actually performs worth a damn. Beyond Niagra, Sun’s own CPU offerings have sucked for years. The opterons kill SPARC for almost everything. Niagra is the only good Sun proc. atm, in my opinion, and you’ll not see that sub-1000 anytime soon!
– Sun brings good things to Market!
– Sun supported Amd dual processors, with Solaris and Linux before ANYONE else would touch them. This is why they get good press on geek sites. They give us some cool options you will never get with the Microsoft/Dell alliance.
– Sun gives us some cool OS features that we can drool about, interesting Computer Science…
– Sun goes after Linux in terms of quality and performance, challenging Linux to be better. Giving us a better product whether it’s openSolaris or Linux.
Makes life interesting in a good way.
Enough reasons?
> Sun brings good things to Market!
Sun has brought some real duds to market, and in many cases refused to support those duds, but point taken.
> Sun supported Amd dual processors, with Solaris and
> Linux before ANYONE else would touch them.
The rest of the market is forcibly locked into Wintendo. This is really not news, but point taken.
> Sun gives us some cool OS features that we can
> drool about, interesting Computer Science…
Very few that are unique. Point not well taken, at least from my perspective.
> Sun goes after Linux in terms of quality and
> performance, challenging Linux to be better.
What you mean to say is that Sun improved their OS dramatically because Linux was destroying it in terms of price/performance & features. Now a small number of the features in the latest Solaris have no parity in Linux, which will drive further Linux development in those directions as well as the traditional ones. Since Solaris is now “free” and “open sourced” it also has price parity, so Linux is a slightly harder sell to those comfortable with Solaris, which means competition between installing one or the other is slightly more complicated.
If that’s what you mean, I agree.
> Makes life interesting in a good way.
It would if there weren’t some real tunnel-vision types hanging around proclaiming Solaris to be the One OS to rule them all.
On a completely unrelated and extraneous note, debian SPARC is annoying me because I use ejabberd to make something out of an old Ultra 10 and they have been months without an update to erlang or ejabberd now in the SPARC tree.
“Come clean, OSNews, or start announcing Dell, MSI, Gateway, Apple, HP, IBM, etc. etc.”
They DO announce Apple and Amiga/Pegasos I guess, and I like it. I don’t care much for a Dell thought but if there are posts about one sure thing.
this I like. but SUN needs to step away from the llli design and either move over to the IV design or use Fujitsu’s processors as planned. by the way does anyone know when sun will start using Figitsu’s proc’s in the mworkstations?
I don’t know date-wise when, but I believe the next SPARC that will be in a workstation will be one of the new Fujitsu models. I don’t remember the source I got that from, but I remember reading it in multiple news sites a while ago. They are probably dangling on to IIIi for workstations waiting for the Fujitsu part. IIIi->IV are both pretty sad, they just need to move away from the lot of them, not go from IIIi->IV. SPARC only makes sense when you’re cramming hundreds of them in a box (something you can’t do with an opteron). Chip per chip comparisons they suck in. Hopefully the Fujitsu part will be worthwhile.
RE: ormandj
Had a look at the Fujitsu processors, and they are VERY competitive price/performance wise – and absolutely CRUSH the UltraSPARC III/IV on the SPEC benchmarks, both int and fpu performance.
Question – whats taking SUN so long? Scared to admit that all the money they’ve thrown at the processor line up, has been a waste of money?
We just bought a bunch of the Opteron boxes for our lab. Very nice work Sun. Faster than hell, well made with great support, and we can run any OS on them we want. I don’t really see much reason to buy Sparc based Suns anymore.
I want to get my hands on some dual-core Opterons to test out, myself. I’d love to see a quality review of them in a server application as compared to Xeons.
RE: ormandj
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity