Ultra40 on trial

Ultra40 on trial / Various — No Comments
05
Oct 06

Kicking the reviewers in the teeth

A letter to PC pro

You have miss stated that the apple mac pro is the fastest PC in the UK in your article here http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/95175/apple-mac-pro-is-crowned-the-fastest-pc-in-the-uk.html

This is complete hogwash, and by that I mean that you really haven’t looked around for fast computers.

The mac pro is cheap but fast prettified nonsense. It looks nice but heres the kicker, the OS and kernel are incredibly slow in comparison to other OS’s and moreover the Xeon is STILL being out performed by opterons.

The Sun ultra40 workstation which you can find here http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra40/

is most certainly the fastest PC in the UK, especially when using Solaris. This essentially rests on the solaris kernels ability to actually make proper use of symmetric multi processors as they’ve had a good 25 years to develop that part of the operating system as it has been their core competency. The Xnu or Xinu or Mach kernel as is in OSX is nothing but a mixed up muddled up BSD/NeXT kernel which is completely incapable of exploiting non determinism within a multi processor setup. Moreover the governance of the SMP in the Xnu kernel is disproportionate to the performance gain.

I have personally seen a sun workstation build a linux kernel in under 10 minutes, generally around 3-4 and wine in around 23 minutes, apple couldn’t even hope to reach that kind of optimised SMP in their operating system and that was all done in LINUX!!! In solaris the performance gains are even more incredible as the solaris kernel is the most advanced kernel in the world.

I therefore suggest that you either haven’t tested this workstation at its highest spec, or have used benchmark tools which are wildly biased against the AMD opteron processor.

Its true what Simon Phipps said to me “Sun never get favourable reviews, even when their products out perform the competition”

Ultra40 on trial / Various / Wine Doors — No Comments
12
Jul 06

In the presence of greatness

When the Sun Microsystems Ultra40 workstation arrived on trial I was considering just how many things we could do with it.

Unwrapping it and getting it running in the first instance wasn’t that easy the thing weighs the same amount as a small car (think Smart), when I turned it on for the first time it had no operating system installed, which was a shame because I really wanted to try solaris 10. After numerous calls to the very helpful girl at Sun (Angie I believe her name is) they had sent out a solaris 10 disc set. I have yet to tackle the solaris installation, but that is something I will hopefully get the time to do. When you first start the machine it sounds like a phantom II jet engine starting up, I got a little worried that this was going to be a permanent problem with the machine, however after a few minutes it calmed right down. They don’t use open firmware on these machines, I thought that was a little strange, as open firmware has been a very important part of Sun’s system line up for some time, they also don’t use EFI from intel, but as these are AMD Opteron there is probably some corporate nonsense running on there, so its a old fashioned bios, still this doesn’t hinder its performance.
I chose to install Fedora Core 5 on the machine, quite simply because it comes in an x86_64 flavour and works pretty much immediately on install. The machine has sat there, a few quake4 tests and alike since it was installed but nothing that was really helpful until yesterday…

I was manipulating large high quality traced images in SVG format using inkscape, there were thousands of points in these SVGs and my athlon workstation was having a really hard time handling them. I decided to move the files over onto the u40, and it was incredible. What was taking 2-3 minutes of CPU time to do on my athlon (for instance move a collection of 5 or 6 points about half a centimeter) was immediate! The application was very responsive, and for something as powerful as inkscape at that size of file I was seriously impressed with it. The machine is very fast, so fast that sometimes its problematic…

How can speed be a problem? Well, the main problem I’ve had is the power button, the button pokes out of the machine a little bit the problem is related to this, the simple fact is that the machine is so quick to shutdown after the button is pressed you don’t know what the hell happened. Some of the buttons on the front of the machine are a little cheap, it would be nice if Sun had the same kind of polished aluminium/magnesium buttons which were countersunk and accidental push resistent, so you had to actually press the button conciously for it to register. This is what apple have done with their powermacs, and its very sensible.

Overall the machine is incredible, one thing I want to use it for specifically is building some custom wine builds for world of warcraft and neverwinter nights, these are two very popular games and if I could include the wine builds as application packs for wine-doors then I would have many more users. To build wine on my machine takes about 6-7 hours I really don’t understand why but it does! I’m hoping the u40 can burn through it in a shorter time as I need time to build -> test -> rebuild until the builds are working perfectly.

More later, after I’ve got wine building ;)