It’s a sad day for all those countless admirers (seriously now, apart from myself…?) of Sun’s Ultra 20 and Ultra 40 workstations. The Ultra 20 M2 and Ultra 40 M4 workstations have quietly reached their end-of-life, meaning the company currently has no more AMD-based workstations on offer. The magnificent case design of these machines, which made its debut in the form of the Sun Ultra 20, appears to be slowely but surely on its way out, since the UltraSPARC-based Ultra 25/45 have also been retired. This leaves the Ultra 24 (x64 Core 2 Duo/Quad) as the sole bearer of this case design. I would be very sad to see the angular and clean design go, seeing I placed it at number 7 on my list of most beautiful computers.
AMD has been hurting for a while in everything but the 4+ socket market. Core i7 is pretty much a knockout punch here (and an imitation of the Opteron somewhat comically).
I’m using an aging IBM IntelliStation A Pro (Opteron 248 x2) at home and am in the market for a new workstation. I hope Sun updates their offerings soon for those of us that still appreciate a good stable WORKSTATION that has been ENGINEERED and not simply assembled like 99% of PCs these days.
Sounds like you want a Mac Pro.
Mac Pros are assembled PCs masquerading as something that is engineered in order to keep the margins high.
… if it makes you feel better.
We’re using HP workstation xw9300, xw9400 (AMD) and xw8400 (Intel) at work, and we’re -very- happy with them.
On a side note, I’ve built two workstation for my personal use: 2 x Opteron 275 (older one) and a new(er) 2 x Xeon E5335 – both using Tyan motherboards, and thus far, these machine work 24×7 without a problem. (knock wood.)
The up side of building the workstation yourself is price: For the price of an HP workstation I can literaly build two no-name workstations.
– Gilboa
We have and use a ton of Ultra’s at work, and frankly Sun has ticked me off a bit too much with their attitude towards the AMD Ultra line. First although they made a great deal of their original announcement, they haven’t supported it worth a dang. Their BIOS releases are slow, late and unremarkable, their Solaris support for the AMD cpu features is lacking and the new u6 release (10/08) shows a pointed preference for Intel x86 CPU’s. Heck, my wife’s 3 year old $80 motherboard has AHCI support on it, something that the Ultra 20 M2 doesn’t even mention.
In a further attempt to drive away their customer base, they quite capably illustrate AMD’s ‘white’ lie that all a company needs to do in order to upgrade to a new Quad Core CPU is to ‘drop in’ a new CPU. Sun has not supported, nor does it appear they will support this feature. Of course I’m sure AMD has a mountain of documentation and mfg resources to do this, but hey, why bother? After all, they can just force their existing customer base to upgrade to new Intel x86 boxes. I see this as Sun showing their customers the back of their hand by forcing them into a more costly upgrade. They would apparantly rather sell more $1000 boxes, than $500 CPU’s.
Offering the upgrade would have been the ‘customer-centric’ thing to do, but this is Sun after all. Heck, I’ve got Gold Warranty support and it’s been 5 days (3 business, 2 weekend), and they still haven’t been able to replace a simple motherboard. Too many excuses and a customer service that leaves too much to be desired. The heck with ’em.
Also their machines were very noisy on load, almost unbearable. You could even hear them in a bigger working environment.
And the onboard-sound is totally whacked because they did bad cabling.
Nice case design, bad system design.
“The Ultra 20 M2 and Ultra 40 M4 workstations have quietly reached their end-of-life”
I was going to say that if you still had one running, the last thing I’d expect would be it quietly reaching its end of life. In my experience after a couple of years the hard-drive either failed or made a horrendous racket.
I had a 40 and then a 40 M2 right next to me for a long time in grad school. The 40 was quieter than the 40 M2, but in general, when the load became high and the big (12 cm?, I dont quite recall) fan spun up, it was low pitched and not that annoying. What was completely unbearable on the M2 was if you did not have the nvidia driver installed in Linux. The fan on the quadro would run at 100% all the time and drive you nuts.
In general, I really liked the box, or more specifically, the chassis. The 1 KW power supply and 8 disk capacity wasn’t bad either…
Agreed, I have worked with both Ultra 20/40. And for the most part they were both quiet as a whistle. Far quieter than most clones I have worked with…
Alas, this is the internet… so most of the most opinionated people have had exactly 0 direct contact with whatever it is they are venting against. LOL.
No need to accuse others.
If you want you can visit my lab and listen to the machines yourself.
YMMV, you know?
I am sorry even comparing with other Sun equipment that is just a boring industrial box. The Ultra 10s had more to them then the 40’s
Just wondering is the Ultra 24 worth picking up? Looking for a decent machine to replace my Power Mac. Is the noise still a problem?
it’s not as noisey as people make it out to be, but if you are in a totaly quiet room you will defenently notice the machine is in there with you.
What xeon class workstation machines currently win on the noise stakes? Apple? Dell? HP? SUN?
Apple.
Thanks for that, is that based on you having used multiple machines of that class or was it more knee jerk?
I have looked at the various tech docs which state the noise levels produced by these machines but often find that they are ‘fanciful’ to out it nicely which is why im after genuine user experience
Edited 2008-11-26 19:56 UTC
in my experience HP’s sollutions up until fairly recently were the most quiet. Within the last year Dell has made a lot of progress with noise reduction and has taken the crown away from HP. I would say Apple is in 4rth place, but very close to SUN.
Apple is one of the few makes which actually includes sound levels as part of their design/validation process.
I have had direct contact with Apple’s Q&A people doing sound validation on some of the parts, the company I work for, provides them. They go as far as bring this PITA guy who has this nutso ear. Even for crap no one can hear, the dude claims he can hear and thus yet a new revision has to be provided for apple. He must be Steve Job’s secret lover or something, because his only job description seems to be to listen to equipment and make sure the noise is up to his very subjective standards…. LOL.
I have seen HP, Dell and Apple.
Apple is super quiet ( Excellent Quality).
HP is quite (Very Good Quailty).
Dell a bit quite (Average Workstation Quality).
I don’t know about Sun Workstations.
I am a Technician
I have also used Dell, HP and Apple machines. The Dells are quiet, the HPs are very quiet and Mac Pros are silent unless they are under heavy load. At home, I sometimes run 2 mac pros simultaneously and sometimes I don’t notice that they are on (I mean running and everything, not in sleep). The only indication that tells me that they are on is the tiny light on the chassis. The stock hard drive on some Mac Pros are a tad noisy though but there are quieter replacement hard drives available.
many thanks for your responses
Its sounding like the Mac Pro may be the way to go (no pun intended)
I absolutely love my Ultra 20, what other box can you buy that has a 5 year warranty!
But realistically Intel have been putting in a lot of work to make sure that Solaris purrs on intel chipsets…AMD meanwhile has been goofing off and leaving a lot of the heavy lifting to Sun.
My next ultra purchase was going to be a 24 anyway…mainly because of the work that intel has done.
Smart move IMHO
We have quite different types of workstations in our lab, a HP xw8600. some Dell T7400 machines, several Mac Pros and a Sun workstation Ultra 40 (AMD based) and without any doubt, the Mac Pro is the best designed one in and out.
The Hp and the Dell are first ugly, terribly ugly and very massive. I mean, for example, the Dell T7400 is really big in size, and so it is very difficult to move it alone, just for a simple action as cleaning the desk (and don’t say me put it on the floor, that does not make sense as it gets a lot of dust very quickly). Also those machines are loud, quite loud as they don’t have an effective cooling system.
The Sun is much better, and actually Sun has made a lot of efforts in their design (so it is quite odd that they give up now in the workstation market), it is Mac Pro inspired, quite cleanly laid out inside, well sized and pretty quite.
The Mac pro turned to be the best engineered workstation out there, the design is gorgeous, it is full featured but well sized and the layout/design inside the machine is second to none, with fast access to the components, tray based disk storage, the machine has 50+ sensors that monitor the machine, Apple builds a dedicated system controller chip that gets/analyzes date from the sensors and controls each fan individually, you get the idea, that’s a very nice system.
You can compare the inner design of the machines by yourself:
– Apple Mac Pro (go to the gallery):
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/mac_pro?mco=M…
– Sun Ultra 40 (go to the gallery):
http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra40/index.xml
– Hp xw8600:
http://www.timelogic.com/codequest_workstation.html
– Dell T7400 (go to Tech Specs):
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/precn_t740…
We can see that there is no so much engineering going on to the HP xw8600 or the Dell T7400, which look more like assembled machines with little considerations on cooling efficiency, heat convection in the system, easy maintainability, etc. I would say that the Dell is the worst, with more cables running everywhere, in comparison, the Mac Pro looks like a marvel in design. The Ultra 40 does a much better job than the xw8600 and Dell T7400.
In terms of reliability i would put the Mac Pro first followed closely by the Ultra 40. Those two machines turned to be very reliable and stable, even in extremely heavy load for numerical simulations. The xw8600 is ok but we had problems with hard drives failures several times even with new systems in the case of T7400.
But in general, it is a pity to see Sun stepping away from the workstation market, i remember the UltraSparc based machines, they were nice, very workstation-like, very loud but very effective. SGI was also a nice workstation maker, they were like Apple, they cared about details. IBM is also dropping its line of powerpc based workstations, the IntelliStation, but there is also Lenovo with its ThinkStation line.
Edited 2008-11-27 04:56 UTC
I wanted to say in the end of my previous message (but i messed up with the editing session which finally ended) that there is also by the way Lenovo with its ThinkStation line, quite better than Dell, slightly better than HP, but still feels like rough assembly.
http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPortal/en…
Edited 2008-11-27 05:10 UTC
I still remember the SUN Ultra 1 and 2. They were highly desirable quality machines in a desktop pizza box form factor.
I guess for me, the most desirable computer today would be the HP Blackbird 002. That’s one very nice machine, but not in a pizza box form factor.