Re: [ccp4bb]: SunBlade 100

[Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk>]

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>>>>> "MB" == Manfred Buehner <buehner@biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de> writes:

 MB> it was pointed out to me that the SUN Blade 100 workstation
 MB> with Expert3D-Lite graphics board could be a sensibly priced
 MB> alternative to Linux machines (leave alone SGI).

That sounds confused.  Linux is a fairly portable kernel which runs on
SPARC and, for that matter, SGI MIPS.  I have GNU/Linux on an Ultra.
A recent development version of Linux (probably in the Debian
`testing' distribution) was reported to have booted on sunblade a few
days ago.

 MB> Is anybody using it and has experience with it (good ones
 MB> or bad ones, esp. compatibility/porting) ? I would appreciate
 MB> hearing of them.

There won't be much experience, since it's so new.  At least early
UltraSPARC III chips are buggy; check before buying.  Since the
hardware is completely new, driver support could be a problem, at
least if don't run what Sun promise to support.  As far as I know, you
must run Slowaris 8 on the hardware if you don't run GNU/Linux.  You
wouldn't expect significant porting problems if you stick to 32-bit
applications.

The performance you get out of the processor will depend to some
extent on what compilers know about optimizing for that model
(nothing, in the case of the released GCC) and anything done to
circumvent chip bugs.  SPARC is more tasteful and generally easier to
optimize for than x86 chips, though, and Sun hardware is normally of
good quality compared to typical PCs.

Try getting one for evaluation.

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