Guest Ramm Posted July 3, 2007 Share Posted July 3, 2007 I was wondering how good/bad the Sun Micro SPARC processors are. Are they better than other AMD/Intel processors? The new ones (T1+T2) look like they could blow the competition away. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/56110-how-are-sparc-processors/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paranoid Marvin Posted July 3, 2007 Share Posted July 3, 2007 From what I have heard, they are good. The problem is, they are highly specialised (hardware and software) so will never penetrate the market. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/56110-how-are-sparc-processors/#findComment-400996 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Ramm Posted July 3, 2007 Share Posted July 3, 2007 Yeah, they are for running *nix only (pretty much), but they still look very good. I want to see how the UltraSPARC T2 performs! Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/56110-how-are-sparc-processors/#findComment-400997 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paranoid Marvin Posted July 3, 2007 Share Posted July 3, 2007 Yeah, they are for running *nix only (pretty much), but they still look very good. I want to see how the UltraSPARC T2 performs! I had always hoped and wondered if Apple ever considered using SPARCs for their servers or workstations. The UltraSPARCs looks awesome - it has 8 cores. They are also making an UltraSPARC Rk with 16 cores. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/56110-how-are-sparc-processors/#findComment-401025 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Envying Posted July 3, 2007 Share Posted July 3, 2007 I would say the most powerful chip right now would be Power 6 from IBM! Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/56110-how-are-sparc-processors/#findComment-401030 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alessandro17 Posted July 3, 2007 Share Posted July 3, 2007 They are of no interest for home users. They are very expensive, used only for high end servers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1#Target_market http://www.sun.com/servers/index.jsp?cat=C...UltraSPARC%20T1 And they support virtually no desktop OS (except maybe for Debian). Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/56110-how-are-sparc-processors/#findComment-401051 Share on other sites More sharing options...
FUKKU Posted July 15, 2007 Share Posted July 15, 2007 SPARC is fine, if you want your OS choices limited to Solaris, Debian, or Windows NT 3.51 Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/56110-how-are-sparc-processors/#findComment-408558 Share on other sites More sharing options...
meistersinger Posted July 17, 2007 Share Posted July 17, 2007 SPARC is not something I would recommend for home use. You can get Solaris 10 for intel for free from Sun's website if you want to play around with it. However, it is not for the faint of heart. I have it, and it gives me fits every time I try to install on My SiS chipset based system. (I DESPISE SiS!) I have also seen Windows NT 3.51 run on non-Intel Hardware, Specifically a DEC Alpha. It ran slower than the slowest 386 at the time. Microsoft didn't do any of the competitors (DEC Alpha, MIPS, Sparc, PPC) any favors. meistersinger Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/56110-how-are-sparc-processors/#findComment-409556 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neilis Posted July 26, 2007 Share Posted July 26, 2007 As others have said, SPARC processors are for very targetted applications. Chip to chip, last I checked they didn't compare very favorably to Intel or AMD (or IBM) offerings. They do have a reputation for scaling very well in a multi-chip/multi-core environment though. Also, it's been years since I wrote any assembly (aside from basic concepts it's a lost skill now), but the SPARC architecture (which is what I learned assembly on) is a dream to write for compared to the muddy mess that is x86. Still, since most people program in something at least moderately high-level these days, that's only a concern for those writing compilers. To the average programmer and user the architecture is transparent. Truthfully, aside from something neat to play around with, it's just not a good chip these days. Even most "enterprise" environments are using x86 based stuff pretty heavily these days (the college that I went to had it's whole computer science dept on SPARC Solaris machines when I got there - by the time I left it was still Solaris but they had switched to plain old Dells running it). The stuff that's too much for x86 is often done by specialized IBM's (AS/400's and such). Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/56110-how-are-sparc-processors/#findComment-415322 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gray_Matter Posted July 28, 2007 Share Posted July 28, 2007 SPARC is fine, if you want your OS choices limited to Solaris, Debian, or Windows NT 3.51 and what is wrong with those OSs Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/56110-how-are-sparc-processors/#findComment-416442 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest pcharles25 Posted July 28, 2007 Share Posted July 28, 2007 Solaris 10 OS is compiled for both x86 x64 as-well. <-- Download it free here --> http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp This is what i say to my customers when they say how fast is it? When you click on something and it instantly opens... that is fast... the only thing faster would be if it opened before you clicked on it. Then you would have other issues. Sun makes servers/workstations... So does everyone else... This all is reminding me of the mac pro... The technology is great for servers, Customers with specialized needs. Totally useless for the rest of us. PS: Just for giggles i wanted to mention the Cell Chip in the sony playstation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_processor "3.2 GHz Cell with 8 SPEs delivering a performance equal to 100 GFLOPS on an average double precision Linpack 4096x4096 matrix" Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/56110-how-are-sparc-processors/#findComment-416480 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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