[SunRescue] What should I look for?

[Paolo Di Francesco]

> 
> > I cannot buy an "old" ATI card (Rage IIc). Noone sells it anymore. Now 
> > everyone has the TNT2 based card, or VoodooIII card, but no old ATI 
> > cards.
> 
> Check mail-order stores.  It's not that old of a card, and they still make
> them.

Hum.. my problem was to find one of these, here in Italy. Noone wants to 
import PCI video card. The PC market is really strong here....

> > Yes, but they cost and people does not want to pay for it... 8(

> This is true, and the high-end 3D market is not Sun's main graphics focus.
> The CAD market probably is a better bet for them.

Yep... I would have and SGI here close to me... 8(

> > Good news for me! But are you using commercial compilers? Have you using 
> > gcc? I have an AXi but I don't know how much fast is compared to the 
> > intel world. Any performance test?
> 
> Mostly raw SPARC V9 assembly with heavy use of VIS.  gcc is wonderfully
> portable but on an Ultra it's quite poor at generating tight code (makes
> sense as even the egcs SPARC optimizer isn't improved much over the
> original gcc 2 optimizer).  Sun's SPARCompilers do a much better job

Yes they do. But they cost too much for me... Remember: I am a student 
but I cannot buy at student prices. Why? Sun-Italy sells only to 
Universities, not to students....

> (especially on fp-intensive code) but I can still squeeze out an extra 30%
> by coding the critical parts in assembly.

What books have you used. I have bought the SparcV9 manual, and I have 
started reading it. Onestly I don't know if I have time to start 
"playing" with assembly.
Currently my projects must run on Linux/Unix mixed enviroinments. So I 
cannot use assembly code...
What project are you working on?

What debugger do you use?

> It all depends on which CPU you're using.  The 270MHz/256k CPU is fairly
> poor due to small cache size, but the 333MHz and up with 2mb cache really
> scream.  If you're doing memory-intensive fp work it's hard to beat an
> Ultra for the price.

300Mhz version 8)

It has a good price/performance ratio. 

(And it was the only avaible at memoryx... ^___^)




Ciao Ciao
       Paolo Di Francesco
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