2.6, smp, status/performance?

[GenTimJS]

One of my friends just got a CS degree, and in his entire four years never touched anything but x86 and barely had any exposure to anything but windows.

I plan on buying him a sparc box as a wedding gift, and as a gift to his resume...

I was eye-ing a rather cheap ultra2 with 512megs of ram and 2 200mhz cpus.

I guess my question is, what is the maturity of SMP in 2.6? working?

also, what kind of actual performance gain will 2 200s give me over just 1 ?
might it actually be "useable" or would a cpu upgrade be in line?

(for benchmark, i found my ultra1 170e "unuseable" as a desktop, it now serves my email, and my ultra5 360 "useable" as a desktop)
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-Tim Smith

[ck3k]

I can't really gauge this toward you situation, but I have a 2x50mhz sparc, which used to be 50mhz until I salvaged a processor from a dead sparc, with SMP you will see some speed enhancements, and overall it is rather seemless. as far as 2x200 that would rock, my ultra 5 is only 270mhz and runs all the gui stuff i want it to i.e. mozilla, windowmaker.
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~:CK:~

[labrador]

It really depends what he intends on doing with it. For one thing I'd gauge
whether there is an interest in getting such hardware. It could become
a doorstop or a heavy item to sell on eBay for a few bucks if
there is a *shrug* reaction.

I've had an Ultra 1 - 170 Mhz, an Ultra 60 300 Mhz, and a PII dual 450
running Gentoo.

The Ultra 1 worked OK as a desktop but I wouldn't want to use it
very long. It would compare roughly with a PII-233 with
a slow non-DMA IDE hard drive. You can use it if you have to,
but you'd just itch for something that doesn't waste your time.
But if you just want to telnet/ssh into it from a Windows box
and tool around with Linux OS and programming applications,
any machine would work.

The Ultra 60 is more responsive and is the minimal I'd consider
getting as a desktop machine with any future growth. In comparing
it with a Pentium machine I have, I find it is similar
to my PII-450 dual processor machine. The second processor
is useful if you want to do stuff like build applications and
not impact the desktop performance, since it allows for
one processor to be tied up and the next one free to
do a new task. The typical purpose of more than one processor
is to keep a server responsive when it has a high load (web/mail/etc.).
If this person just wants to poke around with Linux on it,
I doubt that the dual processor set up would be as valuable
as a decent machine to build on. Big emerge jobs can be
run just as one goes to bed and generally they are finished
the next day (except for the usual biggies). As far as I know,
you can't upgrade the Ultra 2 to anything past 200 Mhz, but I
could be wrong.

The other question is where you are buying it. If from a second hand
online store, they charge way too much. The same stores often
sell hardware on eBay just to move some stock. I picked up my
Ultra 60 for $105 US plus $35 shipping (to Canada) from anysystems.com
on eBay. The same machine sells for around $1000 US on their
online store and many other retailers. The reason this deal is
possible is two-fold: the demand for older Sun hardare is less
than the supply, and this particular seller offers a second chance
offer, which means one doesn't have to try to win the bid to get
a machine (which in turn can potentially eliminate a bidding war
that drives the price up).

[ck3k]

I also would say if buying from an online company make sure the firmware isnt password proctected, I know it is easy to remove, but if your spending any ammount of money like that, you should ask to see the boot prompt.
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~:CK:~

[NetrixTardis]

the Ultra2 can take up to 400mhz UltraSPARC-II processors

http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/hardware/docs/pdf/805-0936-14.pdf

if you want more info on the Ultra2:
http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/hardware/docs/Workstation_Products/Workstations/UltraSPARC_Workstations/Sun_Ultra_2/index.html

and here is a list of specs of Sun's hardware:
http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/

[DominoTree]

I must say it is VERY happy on my Quad Ultrasparc II-400/4mb but that's probably a bit more horsepower than you're looking to get him. I'd say that a dual 200 would run just fine if you had at least 512mb of RAM.
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Running Gentoo on:
Celeron-2.6/512mb - Dedicated server
Quad 4mb Ultrasparc II-400/512mb - Home server
P4-2.4/512mb - Dev machine
Athlon Mobile 1400/256mb - File Server
Athlon XP 2700 @ 2.4ghz/1gb - Workstation
P3-733/512mb - Home mailserver