UNIX admin wrote:
One could say the same about Solaris/SPARC, or AIX/POWEROh, absolutely! SPARC and POWER are way too overpriced, which is just total and complete BS, not to mention that it angers the hell out of customers like me! And then Sun wonders WHY Solaris and SPARC can't pick up critical mass (and believe me, contrary to all the blogging propaganda, they do wonder.)
I don't think it's really fair to compare commodity hardware (mostly x86 based) and high-end chips (SPARC, IA64, Power, ....) on price alone. This is nicely illustrated by RAS characteristics of these chips - the high-end chips are designed with data integrity and system uptime as a primary design concern while the commodity chips generally optimize for performance making some unavoidable RAS tradeoffs; they're playing catch-up slowly as they attempt to push into the datacentre from the desktop. If I were choosing an architecture for a serious application it's a no-brainer decision as far as I'm concerned. Where it would be nice to have more price convergence is in the desktop and small server arena - by my argument I believe the additional costs of say the big new SPARC64 V1 servers is justified for serious applications, but I'm not sure I'd grant quite the same status to an UltraSPARC-IIIi workstation or entry-level server. Gavin
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