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The idea anyone would be running a Sparc in 2007 for performance . . . Some time around 2003 my boss had a Sparc machine as his desktop, though this was widely

• lizknope 2y ago
  At my first job in 1997 I convinced my manager to put Linux x86 boxes on everyone's desks and move the Suns to the server room. The Suns required expensive Sun monitors while we could put cheaper larger higher resolution monitors on a Linux x86 box and display everything over X11. I was in the semiconductor / chip design business and everything ran on Solaris until around 2003 when the 64-bit Opteron came out and we never bought a Sun again.
• mrweasel 2y ago
  While I'm sure they had their use case, the Sun desktops we had while at university in the early 2000s always felt sluggish. The servers didn't seem much better. They'd handle a ton of users, but each would get the same slow experience.
  • bee_rider 2y ago
    Their really competitive era was over by the early 2000’s, right? More of a 90’s company.
    • hondo77 2y ago
      And they were already feeling sluggish by the second half of the 90s. That might be because I had an SGI on my desktop, though.
• bb88 2y ago
  SparcOS was an awesome unix. Linux was respectable as well, but the hardware story in 2007 was much more shitty. Hardware vendors pretty much ignored linux, going for windows as I recall. So if you just wanted a good Unix environment, SparcOS was it. Java/ZFS were both Sun products, and we're still using them today. Just not SparcOS. Sun tried with Project Indiana, but they were getting outpaced by Linux and the open source movement.
  • wmf 2y ago
    No, if you just wanted a good Unix environment in 2007 you would buy an x86 workstation with Linux preinstalled which existed from multiple vendors/VARs. Or Mac.
    • Bluecobra 2y ago
      Solaris 10 worked pretty good on x86 and was free back then. Once Oracle acquired Sun, they eventually started to demand $1K per year per CPU core on hardware that wasn't made by Sun/Oracle.
  • rincebrain 2y ago
    SunOS/Solaris, I believe you mean. OpenSolaris was an interesting experiment.
    • robin_reala 2y ago
      It’s still going, in the form of Illumos: https://illumos.org/ https://illumos.org/
      • rincebrain 2y ago
        Kind of. I was specifically talking about the corporate experiment of deciding to go that hard for open sourcing your crown jewels, and Oracle has notably discontinued their participation in that experiment.
        • 2y ago
• vondur 2y ago
  This is part of the reason why Linux ate their lunch. For the price of one Sun server, you could get 4 Dell servers that ran Linux, and they were faster. Granted, you didn't have all of the redundancy that was built into these higher end Sun systems or the really good support, but hey you had 3 extra machines as a backup.
  • jhbadger 2y ago
    Yeah people used to say in the late 1990s "Linux enthusiasts want it to kill Microsoft, but what it really is doing is killing Sun".
    • tyingq 2y ago
      Well, and what really killed Sun wasn't Linux by itself, but Linux on Opteron/AMD64.
      • AStonesThrow 2y ago
        I would say that there were three factors that superseded Sun, along with most of the other proprietary workstations and servers: FOSS Unix, commodity PC-compatible hardware, and TCP/IP. The big vendors used to be differentiated on how they communicated on a network, shared files, type of bus architecture, and workloads, and so each company or unit would choose a vendor and rely on them for solutions, and the staff had specialized expertise in those systems. But all those vendors found themselves adopting TCP/IP and Ethernet. And Sun's NFS was widely adopted. X11 also became standard. The BSDs already had a wide hardware compatibility list, so that spare machine with no OS license could be returned to service. A few generations of college grads had direct experience with Unix and building PCs. Once Linux on PC-compatibles began showing up in the server room, Windows NT was mature, and software vendors were porting to Linux, it was a fait accompli.
        • panick21_ 2y ago
          Kind of strange to talk about TCP/IP and Ethernet. Sun was the company that pushed that from the beginning. The self configured before others. It was part of why they had more new adoption then DEC/VAX systems. It all comes back to SPARC. Price to performance. If Sun had amazing high quality x86 servers and workstation by 1998, their software would have been perfectly fine. Its not like there was anything missing from Solaris at that time. Many people were not unhappy, they just realized that they could get a faster cheaper machine, and run the same software on a linux. Even if linux was less optimized, still end up cheaper overall for the majority of workloads. Its not like running linux on unsupported PCs in the early 2000 was that much fun. But Sun by 2002 they were still trying to kill x86 based stuff. They bought x64 server line in 2004.
• neilv 2y ago
  I'm sure this end-of-the-line machine had its merits. But if you want the cool of Elvis before he got fat, go back to when a SPARCstation 1 running SunOS 4 was new. The contemporary PC running MS-DOS or early Windows was just a toy by comparison.
  • fidotron 2y ago
    I was one of those annoying unix “I know this” kids except from early exposure to a pizza box Sparcstation, not SGI. That was in the era when Suns sold strangely well to people doing lots of color processing work. (I think you can blame Kodak for that). When the PC ran rings round the Sparc at work I fully understood how far they had fallen.
• chasil 2y ago
  The funny thing is that this is precisely what SPARC did to the VAX.
  • jrpelkonen 2y ago
    It now it seems likely that arm64 will do the same to amd64.
    • bee_rider 2y ago
      It is a little different now, in the 90’s there was so much low hanging fruit that new-thing could be multiple times better than old-thing. Arm might get a durable lead of, ya know, a couple or a dozen percentage points over x86. It isn’t like a quantitative difference so huge that it becomes a qualitative one. In the 90’s, after all, aliens were coming to Earth to steal Intel’s chips.
      • nullindividual 2y ago
        Arm64 (M3) lags behind in some single core benchmarks vs Intel's high end desktop CPUs and is abysmal in multi-core benchmarks due to the limited number of cores, at least according to https://www.cpu-monkey.com https://www.cpu-monkey.com. Granted, the Intel CPU at the high end is pulling 250W+ (or was it 300W+?). There are places for both architectures. I don't see x86 going anywhere unless Intel folds and ceases to design chips. Not sure AMD could power on alone given their current market share, though I certainly hope they could as a user of their chips in the desktop (and conversely, an M2 Air for my laptop).
        • bee_rider 2y ago
          I agree actually, I just wanted to set an upper-bound that nobody could really disagree with in the pro-ARM direction. A minor quibble—high end desktop is a niche almost seemingly intentionally(?) ignored by ARM. Ampere puts out interesting server chips, and Apple puts out interesting laptop chips. What a high end desktop ARM chip? Apple’s max and ultra chips maybe, but they are pretty clearly a compromise with the fact that that market is pretty niche.
• nineteen999 2y ago
  Around that time I was working as a Solaris admin, C/C++ systems programmer and software packager, our manager gifted us all a SunBlade 1000 in my final year there, although we all used Windows laptops for our day to day work. I got blank look when I asked "why?". Sure they were snappy, and you could run StarOffice on them, but really there wasn't a lot that they were useful for in our day to day work. Nice machines to be sure, but completely extraneous. I already had a fleet of Sparc build servers running everything from Solaris 2.5.1 through 2.9 which I used to build and package open source stuff for our corp servers. Turned out there were just some leftover funds at the end of the financial year in our departments budget and he had to spend it somewhere.
  • finaard 2y ago
    I used a Blade 2000 as my main machine until the early 2010s. Doing UNIX work on Windows back then with cygwin was way more painful than it is nowadays, and the hardware was a lot nicer than x86 desktops (and workstations offering things like ECC would've seen you in the same price range anyway). Back then with just dual cores running heavily loaded VMs always was annoying, and slowed your main system down noticeably - so I preferred not doing that on my x86 box. My Sun on the other hand had three SunPCI cards I used for Windows development and testing - which had pretty decent performance, still allowed me to have the disk images on my UNIX filesystem, but didn't ruin my native performance.
  • mschuster91 2y ago
    > Turned out there were just some leftover funds at the end of the financial year in our departments budget and he had to spend it somewhere. Ah, the beloved "use it or lose it" end-of-year crap. So much needless waste just to keep the beancounters happy.
• johnklos 2y ago
  Yeah - my AlphaServer DS25, which is five years older and has dual 1 GHz Alpha CPUs, can keep up quite well in many regards with a dual 1.5 GHz Sun Fire V245 (which is very similar to the Sun machine here).
• shrubble 2y ago
  Solaris' strength was handling jobs under memory pressure and still working, in a way that 2007 Linux would not; however RAM was dropping in price at the time and this wasn't much of a concern as a result, for desktops at least.
  • gorfian_robot 2y ago
    one time we had something going ... wrong. took forever to login and the first person on entered 'uptime' and the load average was in the thousands. nothing was failing. just taking a really really long time to complete.
  • Gibbon1 2y ago
    That's what I remember my sys admin friends saying. The Sun machines could handle heavy loads without falling over. But if you were running a heavy single user application or compiling a big project a commodity wintel box was faster.
    • gorfian_robot 2y ago
      definitely. my company was paid a buncha cash by MS to convert our web infrastructure to Windows NT. We had to have roughly 8x the number of boxes. 4x to handle the load and double that because they had to be rebooted all the damn time to keep them serving.
  • throw0101d 2y ago
    > Solaris' strength was handling jobs under memory pressure and still working […] And under high load. I've had Linux live lock on more than one occasion when load averages hit >100. I've never a Solaris (or FreeBSD) system live lock even under ridiculous loads (200+), and was always been able to login and kill whatever process(es) went sideways.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • Bluecobra 2y ago
• up2isomorphism 2y ago
  Sparc is not for performance, particularly for benchmarks. BTW, even Linux lose benchmarks to windows often times. We used a Sparc Ultra 10 for a Authentication server in 2000, it supports concurrent 100K users without any issue, obviously you need to write your own software, but the server is super stable. And yes, we use cheap x86 + Linux for all sorts of thing from 1996 and it was quite faster but you can not trust it the same way as a Sparc.
  • gorfian_robot 2y ago
    we used to 'joke' that you would have to set one of fire to get it to stop responding to a ping. even then, might take a while.
    • cable 2y ago
      Been there done that? Circa 2001 I had a customer with a rack of 220R's and Clariion storage arrays. I was paged about an app outage and saw (IIRC) "environmental errors" in the logs about the temperature of the machines. One of the Clariion's, in the same rack, had caught fire which brought the database / app down but the 220R's kept chugging along. Unsurprisingly this was quickly followed a call from the NOC that the fire suppression kicking in and that I should down get there ASAP.
      • hnlmorg 2y ago
        Oh wow. I have plenty of fond memories about the stability of Spark Stations but none as fun as that. Thanks for sharing. I did once have a Bullfrog TSS that survived a literal explosion. They certainly don’t build hardware like they used to.
    • pantulis 2y ago
      That was the joke my VMS colleagues said to us the younger unix hotshots.
  • fidotron 2y ago
    My recollection is anyone doing massive concurrency per server (at the time over 10k connections) was moving to using a BSD because of kqueue. We even went through a phase of email on OpenBSD before being bought by a company that insisted on Exchange. Linux didn’t seem to pull decisively ahead of the BSDs until multicore x86 became mainstream. Up until then it always seemed flaky.
• atlgator 2y ago
  I developed cross-platform simulator software back in 2008. One of our platforms was SPARC. Still used heavily at the time. They tried to replace them with SGI Itanium servers and we know how that turned out.
• alsobrsp 2y ago
  I had a Sun as my desktop until 2010 when my Solaris admin gig was eliminated. It was running KDE on three displays. Loved it.
• systems_glitch 2y ago
  This was especially true for workloads that were hard to parallelize. Stuff that lent itself well to parallel execution was sometimes faster, though hyperthreads and multicore single-package CPUs took care of that a few years later.
• walrus01 2y ago
  As I recall in also exactly 2002 to 2003 my desktop setup shifted to a x86 whitebox PC I built myself (32-bit) FreeBSD machine that was running X and KDE2. I had a really nicely customized KDE2 setup and could do a lot with it. It was worlds better than a proprietary OS based Unix-like setup.