[rescue] fastest Ultra 5 marketed by Sun?

[Mark]

On 21 Jul 2007, at 21:55, Patrick Finnegan wrote:

> Oh and the PCI bus...

Because most hardware has to be Sun Authorized and supported  
(graphics cards, disk controllers etc.), and  Solaris is picky about  
the generic stuff it supports on SPARCs, then having PCI isn't that  
big an advantage unless you run Linux, which on a IDE based  
UltraSPARC is not something I recommend (I tried and failed and the  
consequences were not very pleasing).

> Dual CPUs don't always get you much of an advantage, especially
> on single-user workstations.

In Solaris Dual CPUs give you an advantage for multi-tasking and  
multi-threading. If you do more than one thing at once, or you have  
some process that's eating CPU time the U10 just stops dead, whereas  
the Dual CPU machines will simply shove that off onto one CPU and let  
you use the other as required. I'd think even a pair of 250MHZ  
UltraSPARCs would be more usable than a single 440MHz most of the time.

The difference in speed between a U10 440MHz and a Dual 400MHz U60  
both running 10k SCSI drives is astounding, even for menial desktop  
stuff like web browsing etc. 1GB of RAM, 2 hard drives and 2 CPUs/ 
Cores is really a minimum in my mind to usable decent performance out  
of Solaris 10. A U5 or U10 with 512MB RAM is probably better suited  
to running Solaris 8 or 9. Even in Solaris 7 o an an SS20  the impact  
of adding a second 55MHz CPU is massive.

> And, for most people, the benefit of cheap IDE drives outweighs the  
> IDE
> vs SCSI performance difference.

That's on of the nicest things about the U10 - finding a DVD drive in  
order to install from Sun media is distinctly easier!

-- 
Mark Benson

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