> If only a T2 based workstation could be produced at a > reasonable price > including a decent basic graphics card (and these > days I think "basic" > should _include_ some 3D acceleration as well as the > capability and bandwidth > to drive full 1080p video), I think that would kick > tail as a workstation.
Hmmm... that'd be a close shave. Having worked with UltraSPARC T2s quite a bit, I'd say that the T2 is still pretty weak for the desktop workloads, precisely because of his single-thread performance. You'd have to have software that was highly optimized for either threading, or that was designed around spawning child processes ala Apache httpd or ISC's named. For the desktop, a Fujitsu SPARC64 CPU would currently make the most sense, IF, and only IF, it was made dirt-cheap like a run o' the mill PC-bucket, something which is not likely to happen. In my tests, the SPARC64 came out first at single thread number crunching, being twice as fast as the then-fastest Pentium 4 @3.2GHz (the SPARC64 I tested was clocked at 1.8GHz). The T2 came last, being twice as slow as the 32-bit Pentium 4 which a refer to here. Possibly, if the UltraSPARC Rock CPU lives up to the hype, and is made sufficiently cheap, the SPARC would once again have a horse for the race. However, given the Sun microsystems' decisions in the past, as well as their gross negligence, greediness and mismanagement of the SPARC prodct line, I don't see it happening. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
