Sun Rivals Blast SPARCstation 2 in UNIX TODAY!

[John Mashey]

In article <744 at brchh104.bnr.ca> elling at eng.auburn.edu (Richard Elling) writes:

Some of this article was pretty silly, as was the title.

>... the next generation of SPARC chips become available such as the
>Solbourne chip used in the S-4000.

Please see the performance level delivered by that chip.  I hear about 12
SPECmarks, @ 25/33 MHZ (I've heard both, so I'm confused), i.e., 60-70% of
what a 25MHz R3000 delivers (and the cost of the R3000/R3010+cache+glue is
something like $350; I've SEEN the Solbourne chip, and I rather doubt it
costs less than that....)

The interesting next SPARC will be the Sun/TI Viking.  (personal opinion:
most of the rest don't count; Viking is the one Sun is designing in and
working on like crazy.)

>Anyway, I thought the article was good for a deep-belly laugh :-)  After
>all, they didn't say those nasty things about the SPARC architecture when
>the 4/490 came out... maybe because they didn't have a truly competitive
>machine at the time?

I have no idea what they were thinking.  We of course didn't say anything,
although the 490 & MIPS M/2000 are pretty much twins, except for the
M/2000 doing a little better on multi-user performance, and the M/2000
shipped 1 year earlier...

A more rational article in the first place would have said:

1) SS2 looks OK, but it's essentially playing catchup with DEC 5000s and
MIPS Magnums (i.e., it's a little faster, but not much), and the
cost/performance is no better, in practice.  [Remember when Sun was always
first out the door, and almost always had an edge in cost/performance?)
The SS2 is a good machine, but doesn't seem like anything special to me.
(Unlike, the first SS1, which was a real breakthru at the time, especially
in terms of packaging and low parts-count).

2) R3000As will be coming in machines soon: the first serious tuneup of
many of the original circuits design in 1985 for 2mcron CMOS will let us
get good yield @ 33MHz, and some faster.  Given all of the usual numbers,
33MHz R3000As are about as fast as 50MHz Cypress SPARCs, and I think it is
true that those will difficult, or at least expensive (need very special
modules), but not impossible.  Certainly, life will get tought for
everybody, fairly soon, with the existing designs, which is why everyone
is working on something different, of course:-)

-john mashey	DISCLAIMER: <generic disclaimer, I speak for me only, etc>
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