I was just curious if anyone has used a ultra sparcIIIi based server or knows anything about them and how well they stack up against the xeons? reason being i was considering eventually buying a server to test out some server hosting ideas i have to start a business and if there is enough of a performance increase with a sparc based system i think i would lean that way even though there expensive as hell.

Go with an ultraSPARC or a opteron, they still kick ass, and you can find a Sun for pretty cheap on ebay...

Ya i was actually thinking about going with a system from sun i wanted to get dual 1.6ghz ultra sparc IIIi's with 2 gigs of ram and turn it into a game server/webserver. that system configured exactly the way i want it is around 6k but they have a deal where u can try it for 30days then buy it for 40% off so around 3.5-4k would be really good for that setup but also for around the same price i can have a dual 45nm quadcore xeon system with 2 gigs of ram and 2 10krpm scsi drives and thats with server 2003 its cheaper but will the 2 1.6 ghz ultra sparcs still blow the 8 core power of the xeons out of the water like back in the day?

*edit*
By anychance do u know how many logical processors one of the 1.6ghz UltraSPARC IIIi produce?

I dont know i cant really figure it out everything im reading is saying it has 8 cores that can process 4 threads equaling 32 threads of processing ability? is that accurate for a 1.6ghz ultrasparc IIIi? this is the exact one im talking about Sun Ultra 45 Workstation - At a glance Thats the workstation model it supports up to 2 physical processors and if the math im reading all over is right with 2 1.6ghz ultrasparc IIIi on that workstation it will have 64 threads of processing ability? does any of this sound right to anyone?

Quote: Originally Posted by xgeko2 I dont know i cant really figure it out everything im reading is saying it has 8 cores that can process 4 threads equaling 32 threads of processing ability? is that accurate for a 1.6ghz ultrasparc IIIi? this is the exact one im talking about Sun Ultra 45 Workstation - At a glance Thats the workstation model it supports up to 2 physical processors and if the math im reading all over is right with 2 1.6ghz ultrasparc IIIi on that workstation it will have 64 threads of processing ability? does any of this sound right to anyone?

you need to step back and take a look at the bigger picture. Is the software that you are going to be running windows based or solaris based?

if you are gong solaris based, then i would go for this machine.

if you are going windows based, then this machine is a giant waste of $$$

it all comes back to the thread handling. 1st the software you are using is it muti-threaded?? if you awnser no to this, a quad core system would be a waste.

if your software is written for windows and handles multi-threading, it is unlikley that it will be able to utalize more then 4 threads at once.


do your self a favor, go get a dual core opteron system, with 8gb of memory, sata hard drives, and run 2003 64bit os. you will save your self time and money (give it time, the software will someday catch up to the hardware, and of course i am speaking of the windows world.)

I would be running single threaded applications but i would be running alot of them at the same time of the same program. for instance i would be running say 20+ instances of hlds at the same time lol. plus say 20+instaces of source hlds stuff like that which is kinda the reason i was looking towards maximum number of threads being processed at the same time. i know a ultrasparcII system would work great for what i want to do because i know that they were deisgned that way but i cant find solid evidence how the ultrasparcIIIi Jbus is designed its sapposed to be based off of it which is why im hearing everywhere that each processor can handle 32 threads. im just trying to confirm it before i make any decisions.

*edit*i would probably be running solaris if there is a gui already setup to control it considering im still not really good with the command line in linux, i know enough with the command line to setup everything once i have it running but im just not comfortable running a straight tui interface yet.

well next question if anyone knows does the ultrasparc platform have x86 compatability?

I vote you get an x86 box.

The the best of my knowledge (and googeling which you should have done) hlds does not have a sparc build, nor are they planning on making one.

Besides that, think of all you know about windows and x86. Throw that out the window, the start from a clean slate.

yea i already checked in on that but it dosnt mean that sparc dosnt have x86 compatability i havnt seen that yet everything i read about was for the older sparc processors im talking about newer hardware if the newer hardware does have x86 support then i should be fine with the linux version of the standalone hlds.