5 ms·

Living my best Sun Microsystems ecosystem life in 2025

98 points by birdculture 1y ago

PaulHoule 1y ago
(200x) "Never bet against x86" -> (202x) "Never bet against ARM"
- hulitu 1y ago
  > (200x) "Never bet against x86" -> (202x) "Never bet against ARM" Citation needed. There is only 1 workstation maker with ARM: Apple.
  - Octoth0rpe 1y ago
    nvidia dgx spark? also, system76 has one: https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1.1-n1/configure https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1.1-n1/configure also, dell: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/dell-pro-max-with-gb10/spd/dell-pro-max-fcm1253-micro/xcto_fcm1253_usx https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/dell-pro-m... HP is coming soon, will be called `ZGX Nano AI Station` apparently Also lenovo: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/workstations/thinkstation-p-series/lenovo-thinkstation-pgx-sff/len102s0023 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/workstations/thinkstation-p-s...
    - ndiddy 1y ago
      All of those use the same nVidia chip and the same nVidia provided Linux distro. Personally I'd be wary of spending $3500+ on a system that relies on nVidia support. They previously released an AI focused SBC, the Jetson Nano, that shipped with a custom distro based on the already aging Ubuntu 18.04, then abandoned support for it after a few years. All the dependencies required to run ML/AI stuff became outdated, and the hardware is now basically useless. It's possible to run mainline Linux on it, but you can't do anything with the GPU since that requires a special one-off driver that never got upstreamed.
      - Octoth0rpe 1y ago
        > All of those use the same nVidia chip and the same nVidia provided Linux distro The system76 one uses an ampere chip, but a discrete nvidia card; so not quite the same. Generally I agree, I do not mix nvidia/linux. The point is that arm workstations are clearly being produced by many different vendors at this point.
        ndiddy 1y ago
        Thanks for pointing that out, I must have skipped over the system76 link. You're right that besides Apple, nVidia and Ampere also make viable ARM workstation chips.
  - afr0ck 1y ago
    There are Qualcomm laptops now I believe (at least that's what I heard when I was last working for them). NXP also made some boxes (I own a bunch of them). The server market is also growing with Ampere and Cavium (now Novell) which I have both.
    - cayleyh 1y ago
      Also AWS Graviton and Google Axion servers & VMs on those clouds
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    You can get ARM-based PCs and laptops. Thing is so far they all suck except for Apple right now. I sure as hell hope that if Qualcomm even comes close to parity with other platforms they change their name because I'm going to have a hard time associated Snapdragon and their other products with anything that is quality. So far these are for desktop CPUs what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant is for cars. On the other hand, Intel is doing everything it can to keep the x86 platform from advancing which will let even the laggards catch up.
    - lproven 1y ago
      > You can get ARM-based PCs and laptops. Thing is so far they all suck except for Apple right now. This is true, but there's a consolation -- they suck much much less than RISC-V kit. I run a bunch of nearly 15 year old laptops. I am not a performance addict. But I have not laid fingers on a RISC-V box I'd be willing to spend a morning on.
      - snvzz 1y ago
        That'll be true for a few months at best. The first RVA23 and development boards are coming. Tenstorrent announced Atlantis in the RISC-V Summit, based on Ascalon microarchitecture and due 2026H1.
        lproven 1y ago
        > That'll be true for a few months at best. The thing is, I have been in this business for 38 years now, and people have been telling me this for at least 3 or 4 years now. Including face-to-face from industry chip makers. Really, honestly, right now, next month, OK, next quarter, but definitely by next year, really, the next generation is coming and it will bring the speed. The performance is coming, really soon. And in fact, it's dire. It's crap. Apple has a huge lead with its Arm chips and although most of the team that made that happen went off to other companies years ago now, nobody else has caught up. Qualcomm isn't there, but it's closer than anyone else. Amazon's server chips look promising but they're huge multicore things, not desktop/single-user devices at all, and they're very expensive in standalone desktops like from System 76. Nobody so far can equal what Arm can do in skilled hands, and I bought my first desktop Arm computer in 1989. I've known that the potential was there for over a third of a century because I was there at the start. I have Raspberry Pi 3, 4 and 5 devices here. Look at this thing: https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1.1-n1/configure https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1.1-n1/configure It is one hundred times the price of a Pi and can it deliver 100x the single thread performance? No, it cannot. Can any money buy a RISC-V that can compare to the performance of a $60 Pi 5? I don't think it can, and promises of "jam tomorrow" don't cut it.
- bitwize 1y ago
  "Never bet against Apple"
throw0101c 1y ago
> Solaris, meanwhile, which had long been available on x86, saw its “own” ISA SPARC live on in the server space until roughly 2017 or so, and was even briefly available as open source until Oracle did its thing. Maybe worth noting that SPARC was (is?) licensable: * https://sparc.org https://sparc.org OpenSPARC is under GPL2. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12578083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12578083
dboreham 1y ago
Note that the rise of Linux was caused by the rise of low cost, high performance x86 CPUs. There was a period of time when it was obvious you could get much more bang for the buck from x86, but there wasn't a viable OS to use (for servers). Yes NT existed, and we shipped binaries for NT but it was always an awkward fit to run server software on NT. So Linux, which at the time was kind of crappy (unreliable, didn't have threading) was improved by various vendors' efforts to the point where they could re-target their server products into PC-class hardware. Sun was sunk by the people who were downstream in the value chain leading back to Sun's revenue working hard to design Sun out of the loop, by means of PC-class hardware and the Linux OS.
- rjsw 1y ago
  UNIX was available for x86 systems for several years before Linux was released.
  - Apocryphon 1y ago
    And what about *BSD?
    - lproven 1y ago
      Came along later. 386BSD was 1992: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.bsd/c/TZ-gIRRHiXA/m/eAe6xqiqiU0J https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.bsd/c/TZ-gIRRHiXA/m/eA... BSD/386, later BSD/OS, was 1993: https://www.krsaborio.net/bsd/research/1993/0411.htm https://www.krsaborio.net/bsd/research/1993/0411.htm A pic of a contemporary advert: https://gunkies.org/wiki/BSD/386 https://gunkies.org/wiki/BSD/386
    - laxd 1y ago
      "If 386BSD had been available before I created Linux, then Linux might not have been born" - Linus My impression is that there was also a bit of a culture clash. BSD was the white coat academic world and not very welcoming to outsiders. Linux was the dirty hacker style at a time where online collab became a thing. And then there was the lawsuit that held back BSD at a crucial time in history.
buildbot 1y ago
I love my ultra 45, it’s certainly the best looking of the early 2000s unix workstations! I lucked out and got a system with 16GB And 2x procs, added in the XVR-2500 and PcPro to play with. It’s also ex-Lockheed Martin which is fun/mildly alarming! Since this thread is likely to draw knowledgable sparc people, there’s a totally unrelated question I have - I have a sun blade 150, and was looking around on the motherboard. There are few jumpers that say things like “x86 debug” or x86 rom something - and the socket is technically 378… and from what I can research, the chipset worked with x86… Was there a point at which the sun blade motherboard was setup to work with either sparc or x86?! Not so crazy given AMD made a chipset that worked for both alpha and x86, and HP had the zx1 chipset that worked on itanium and hp-parisc? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_chipsets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_chipsets 750/760 both work for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_21264 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_21264 https://www.openpa.net/pa-risc_chipsets_zx1.html https://www.openpa.net/pa-risc_chipsets_zx1.html
cameron_b 1y ago
I would love to hear counterpoints -- The Sun Ray thin client experience seems interesting, but the modern version of that seems to be the web/app/cloud ecosystem we have now (where the load and storage of your interaction are resident on some other system, potentially freeing up your local device from resource needs). Specifically, a self-hosted collaborative model with Nextcloud + Collabora or similar. I do wonder what workloads or designs would be fit for a more "time-sharing" approach.
- abhiyerra 1y ago
  I do wonder if a lot of the stuff that Google has worked on Google Docs, Chromebook were inspired by Sun. Eric Schmidt was a VP at Sun and Novell before joining Google.
- titzer 1y ago
  I used a Sun Ray for two summers when interning at Sun Labs in 2002 and 2003. They were kind of awesome and kind of sucked at the same time. First, the display wasn't that great for the time, and they were expensive for what you got. Second, we had ours hooked up to (one of) the labs' E10ks. Because it was shared amongst many users, some things could get janky under load. One thing in particular is that certain image formats were heavier than others, and the crappy Firefox at the time could cause jank for multiple users when processing image-heavy webpages. It was a neat party trick to take your ID card out of your terminal and walk down the hall, put it into someone else's and boom, have your session, but that was more rare than you might think. All in all I think I would prefer a workstation. Admins on the other hand, probably preferred these. If the thin clients were more like $100-200, this would have taken over the world. But they were more like $1000+. Sun considered that a bargain. Which shows you what Sun thought consumers.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
    > But they were more like $1000+. Sun considered that a bargain. Which shows you what Sun thought consumers. For Sun hardware? I'm pretty sure that was a bargin
  - cjsplat 1y ago
azalemeth 1y ago
I sold an old Ultra45 from my lab on eBay rather than letting the university people scrap it. It went for the equivalent of $2000 (which I later donated to a charity) and attracted quite a bidding war. Apparently at least one major airport (I won't say where or in which bit of the world) used one to control its landing light system and were, through a weird network of contractors, looking to buy more hardware for redundancy... I have also put an IndyO2 SGI machine on eBay that similarly found a repurposed fate. We are now finally at the point where the machines I held on to as a teenager much to my mum's chagrin are now becoming highly valuable again!
- kev009 1y ago
  Yup, the most desirable RISC systems are in the four figure range these days. SGIs have a zealous collector community and a long tail of applications like simulators keeping up demand.
WarcrimeActual 1y ago
> No “AI” writing aids, no “AI” summaries, no ChatGPT, no Gemini search nonsense, nothing. I take pride in doing research and writing properly, without the “aid” of digital parrots with brain damage, and if there’s any errors, they’re mine and mine alone. Take pride in your work and reject “AI”. This guy better not be using spell check with a tantrum like that tagged to his opening line.
- pklausler 1y ago
  If you think spell(1) is AI, you misunderstand at least one of them.
  - jasomill 1y ago
    To be fair, I've seen definitions of AI so broad that they'd probably include the root finder on my HP-15C.
- laxd 1y ago
  I like it. Remember when people used to have badges on their sites? Like HTML5 or XHTML or Apache or whatever. Maybe we could bring back one for "made by humans".
  - kwk1 1y ago
    I recently learned those have a name based on their dimensions: https://88x31.nl/ https://88x31.nl/
MarkusWandel 1y ago
"Hot desking like it's 2007"... Nowadays instead of carrying a smartcard you carry a slim 13" laptop and plug in a single USB-C cable from the docking station. Much better, yes. But just being able to plug in a smart card in a meeting room and get going instantly would be appreciated even today.
- cryptonector 1y ago
  It would be amazing to have SunRay style just-plugin-your-smartcard and done hot desking. And in particular it would be amazing for that to work with a) huge monitors, b) audio and video.
bitwize 1y ago
The closest I came to a SPARC lifestyle was booting Solaris 2.6 in qemu, so that I could emulate logging in to my university's EECS department's SPARC server way back when. Nice to see someone with the geekiness and wherewithal to really commit to the bit.
cryptonector 1y ago
Oh man, I miss SunRays!

98 points by birdculture 1y ago

PaulHoule 1y ago

(200x) "Never bet against x86" -> (202x) "Never bet against ARM"

hulitu 1y ago
> (200x) "Never bet against x86" -> (202x) "Never bet against ARM" Citation needed. There is only 1 workstation maker with ARM: Apple.
- Octoth0rpe 1y ago
  nvidia dgx spark? also, system76 has one: https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1.1-n1/configure https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1.1-n1/configure also, dell: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/dell-pro-max-with-gb10/spd/dell-pro-max-fcm1253-micro/xcto_fcm1253_usx https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/dell-pro-m... HP is coming soon, will be called `ZGX Nano AI Station` apparently Also lenovo: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/workstations/thinkstation-p-series/lenovo-thinkstation-pgx-sff/len102s0023 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/workstations/thinkstation-p-s...
  - ndiddy 1y ago
    All of those use the same nVidia chip and the same nVidia provided Linux distro. Personally I'd be wary of spending $3500+ on a system that relies on nVidia support. They previously released an AI focused SBC, the Jetson Nano, that shipped with a custom distro based on the already aging Ubuntu 18.04, then abandoned support for it after a few years. All the dependencies required to run ML/AI stuff became outdated, and the hardware is now basically useless. It's possible to run mainline Linux on it, but you can't do anything with the GPU since that requires a special one-off driver that never got upstreamed.
    - Octoth0rpe 1y ago
      > All of those use the same nVidia chip and the same nVidia provided Linux distro The system76 one uses an ampere chip, but a discrete nvidia card; so not quite the same. Generally I agree, I do not mix nvidia/linux. The point is that arm workstations are clearly being produced by many different vendors at this point.
      - ndiddy 1y ago
        Thanks for pointing that out, I must have skipped over the system76 link. You're right that besides Apple, nVidia and Ampere also make viable ARM workstation chips.
- afr0ck 1y ago
  There are Qualcomm laptops now I believe (at least that's what I heard when I was last working for them). NXP also made some boxes (I own a bunch of them). The server market is also growing with Ampere and Cavium (now Novell) which I have both.
  - cayleyh 1y ago
    Also AWS Graviton and Google Axion servers & VMs on those clouds
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  You can get ARM-based PCs and laptops. Thing is so far they all suck except for Apple right now. I sure as hell hope that if Qualcomm even comes close to parity with other platforms they change their name because I'm going to have a hard time associated Snapdragon and their other products with anything that is quality. So far these are for desktop CPUs what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant is for cars. On the other hand, Intel is doing everything it can to keep the x86 platform from advancing which will let even the laggards catch up.
  - lproven 1y ago
    > You can get ARM-based PCs and laptops. Thing is so far they all suck except for Apple right now. This is true, but there's a consolation -- they suck much much less than RISC-V kit. I run a bunch of nearly 15 year old laptops. I am not a performance addict. But I have not laid fingers on a RISC-V box I'd be willing to spend a morning on.
    - snvzz 1y ago
      That'll be true for a few months at best. The first RVA23 and development boards are coming. Tenstorrent announced Atlantis in the RISC-V Summit, based on Ascalon microarchitecture and due 2026H1.
      - lproven 1y ago
        > That'll be true for a few months at best. The thing is, I have been in this business for 38 years now, and people have been telling me this for at least 3 or 4 years now. Including face-to-face from industry chip makers. Really, honestly, right now, next month, OK, next quarter, but definitely by next year, really, the next generation is coming and it will bring the speed. The performance is coming, really soon. And in fact, it's dire. It's crap. Apple has a huge lead with its Arm chips and although most of the team that made that happen went off to other companies years ago now, nobody else has caught up. Qualcomm isn't there, but it's closer than anyone else. Amazon's server chips look promising but they're huge multicore things, not desktop/single-user devices at all, and they're very expensive in standalone desktops like from System 76. Nobody so far can equal what Arm can do in skilled hands, and I bought my first desktop Arm computer in 1989. I've known that the potential was there for over a third of a century because I was there at the start. I have Raspberry Pi 3, 4 and 5 devices here. Look at this thing: https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1.1-n1/configure https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1.1-n1/configure It is one hundred times the price of a Pi and can it deliver 100x the single thread performance? No, it cannot. Can any money buy a RISC-V that can compare to the performance of a $60 Pi 5? I don't think it can, and promises of "jam tomorrow" don't cut it.
bitwize 1y ago
"Never bet against Apple"

throw0101c 1y ago

> Solaris, meanwhile, which had long been available on x86, saw its “own” ISA SPARC live on in the server space until roughly 2017 or so, and was even briefly available as open source until Oracle did its thing. Maybe worth noting that SPARC was (is?) licensable: * https://sparc.org https://sparc.org OpenSPARC is under GPL2. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12578083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12578083

dboreham 1y ago

Note that the rise of Linux was caused by the rise of low cost, high performance x86 CPUs. There was a period of time when it was obvious you could get much more bang for the buck from x86, but there wasn't a viable OS to use (for servers). Yes NT existed, and we shipped binaries for NT but it was always an awkward fit to run server software on NT. So Linux, which at the time was kind of crappy (unreliable, didn't have threading) was improved by various vendors' efforts to the point where they could re-target their server products into PC-class hardware. Sun was sunk by the people who were downstream in the value chain leading back to Sun's revenue working hard to design Sun out of the loop, by means of PC-class hardware and the Linux OS.

rjsw 1y ago
UNIX was available for x86 systems for several years before Linux was released.
- Apocryphon 1y ago
  And what about *BSD?
  - lproven 1y ago
    Came along later. 386BSD was 1992: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.bsd/c/TZ-gIRRHiXA/m/eAe6xqiqiU0J https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.bsd/c/TZ-gIRRHiXA/m/eA... BSD/386, later BSD/OS, was 1993: https://www.krsaborio.net/bsd/research/1993/0411.htm https://www.krsaborio.net/bsd/research/1993/0411.htm A pic of a contemporary advert: https://gunkies.org/wiki/BSD/386 https://gunkies.org/wiki/BSD/386
  - laxd 1y ago
    "If 386BSD had been available before I created Linux, then Linux might not have been born" - Linus My impression is that there was also a bit of a culture clash. BSD was the white coat academic world and not very welcoming to outsiders. Linux was the dirty hacker style at a time where online collab became a thing. And then there was the lawsuit that held back BSD at a crucial time in history.

buildbot 1y ago

I love my ultra 45, it’s certainly the best looking of the early 2000s unix workstations! I lucked out and got a system with 16GB And 2x procs, added in the XVR-2500 and PcPro to play with. It’s also ex-Lockheed Martin which is fun/mildly alarming! Since this thread is likely to draw knowledgable sparc people, there’s a totally unrelated question I have - I have a sun blade 150, and was looking around on the motherboard. There are few jumpers that say things like “x86 debug” or x86 rom something - and the socket is technically 378… and from what I can research, the chipset worked with x86… Was there a point at which the sun blade motherboard was setup to work with either sparc or x86?! Not so crazy given AMD made a chipset that worked for both alpha and x86, and HP had the zx1 chipset that worked on itanium and hp-parisc? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_chipsets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_chipsets 750/760 both work for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_21264 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_21264 https://www.openpa.net/pa-risc_chipsets_zx1.html https://www.openpa.net/pa-risc_chipsets_zx1.html

cameron_b 1y ago

I would love to hear counterpoints -- The Sun Ray thin client experience seems interesting, but the modern version of that seems to be the web/app/cloud ecosystem we have now (where the load and storage of your interaction are resident on some other system, potentially freeing up your local device from resource needs). Specifically, a self-hosted collaborative model with Nextcloud + Collabora or similar. I do wonder what workloads or designs would be fit for a more "time-sharing" approach.

abhiyerra 1y ago
I do wonder if a lot of the stuff that Google has worked on Google Docs, Chromebook were inspired by Sun. Eric Schmidt was a VP at Sun and Novell before joining Google.
titzer 1y ago
I used a Sun Ray for two summers when interning at Sun Labs in 2002 and 2003. They were kind of awesome and kind of sucked at the same time. First, the display wasn't that great for the time, and they were expensive for what you got. Second, we had ours hooked up to (one of) the labs' E10ks. Because it was shared amongst many users, some things could get janky under load. One thing in particular is that certain image formats were heavier than others, and the crappy Firefox at the time could cause jank for multiple users when processing image-heavy webpages. It was a neat party trick to take your ID card out of your terminal and walk down the hall, put it into someone else's and boom, have your session, but that was more rare than you might think. All in all I think I would prefer a workstation. Admins on the other hand, probably preferred these. If the thin clients were more like $100-200, this would have taken over the world. But they were more like $1000+. Sun considered that a bargain. Which shows you what Sun thought consumers.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  > But they were more like $1000+. Sun considered that a bargain. Which shows you what Sun thought consumers. For Sun hardware? I'm pretty sure that was a bargin
- cjsplat 1y ago

azalemeth 1y ago

I sold an old Ultra45 from my lab on eBay rather than letting the university people scrap it. It went for the equivalent of $2000 (which I later donated to a charity) and attracted quite a bidding war. Apparently at least one major airport (I won't say where or in which bit of the world) used one to control its landing light system and were, through a weird network of contractors, looking to buy more hardware for redundancy... I have also put an IndyO2 SGI machine on eBay that similarly found a repurposed fate. We are now finally at the point where the machines I held on to as a teenager much to my mum's chagrin are now becoming highly valuable again!

kev009 1y ago
Yup, the most desirable RISC systems are in the four figure range these days. SGIs have a zealous collector community and a long tail of applications like simulators keeping up demand.

WarcrimeActual 1y ago

> No “AI” writing aids, no “AI” summaries, no ChatGPT, no Gemini search nonsense, nothing. I take pride in doing research and writing properly, without the “aid” of digital parrots with brain damage, and if there’s any errors, they’re mine and mine alone. Take pride in your work and reject “AI”. This guy better not be using spell check with a tantrum like that tagged to his opening line.

pklausler 1y ago
If you think spell(1) is AI, you misunderstand at least one of them.
- jasomill 1y ago
  To be fair, I've seen definitions of AI so broad that they'd probably include the root finder on my HP-15C.
laxd 1y ago
I like it. Remember when people used to have badges on their sites? Like HTML5 or XHTML or Apache or whatever. Maybe we could bring back one for "made by humans".
- kwk1 1y ago
  I recently learned those have a name based on their dimensions: https://88x31.nl/ https://88x31.nl/

MarkusWandel 1y ago

"Hot desking like it's 2007"... Nowadays instead of carrying a smartcard you carry a slim 13" laptop and plug in a single USB-C cable from the docking station. Much better, yes. But just being able to plug in a smart card in a meeting room and get going instantly would be appreciated even today.

cryptonector 1y ago
It would be amazing to have SunRay style just-plugin-your-smartcard and done hot desking. And in particular it would be amazing for that to work with a) huge monitors, b) audio and video.

bitwize 1y ago

The closest I came to a SPARC lifestyle was booting Solaris 2.6 in qemu, so that I could emulate logging in to my university's EECS department's SPARC server way back when. Nice to see someone with the geekiness and wherewithal to really commit to the bit.

cryptonector 1y ago

Oh man, I miss SunRays!