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_Garrett
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Joined: 05 Sep 2004
Posts: 12
Location: Switzerland

PostPosted: Mon Dec 06, 2004 9:53 pm    Post subject: Why do you use sparc? Reply with quote

As i can see in this forum there are people who like the sparc-computers more than x86-computers. Why?
What are the advantages and disadvantages, what makes them special?
I need some hints to descover my UltraSparc Box (i got the kernel running today) :)

Sry if my english is bad.
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bmichaelsen
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Joined: 17 Nov 2002
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PostPosted: Tue Dec 07, 2004 1:25 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I dont own a SPARC.
Quote:
.... what makes them special?

Just look at the assembler of the SPARCs - it is a great design. Clean, usable and scalable. (Ok, the PPCs probably also have a pretty good design, but they are newer and *knew* some of the problems of x86 CPU architecture). SPARC did it right from the start.
Take a look at the V8 (32-Bit SPARC) Architecture Book from the SPARC page and compare the architecture with x86.
http://www.sparc.org/standards.html
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GenTimJS
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Joined: 03 May 2003
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PostPosted: Wed Dec 08, 2004 1:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I cant speak for the others but ...


X86 sucks. Bad. The basic design is full of holdovers from the 1970s and early 1980s. The base instruction set is still CISC, and was never designed for any kind of advanced multitasking or SMP operations. Nevermind ASMP ...

.. A20 gateway... hello!!! ....

I take a lot of personal satisfaction in knowing that the computer on my desk is a peice of modern technology with few 20 year old "legacy" holdovers. Just knowing that I have a non-sucky computer doing my work and playing my games gives me an enormous sense of satisfaction simmilar to what people must feel when driving an electric car.

While my primary sparc (A 750mhz ultrasparc III powered SB1000) may not be as fast as my fastest X86 box, it WAY outpaces any 750mhz X86 and has still taken its place as my "primary" desktop, beating much faster systems out of the running (where those systems are used almost only for games)...

It basically comes down to preferance. Personally I've upped my standards of reliability and performance, and as such given Intel the big one-finger-salute .....
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ibtim13
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Joined: 12 Sep 2003
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PostPosted: Wed Dec 08, 2004 6:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I use sparc because it is a different architecture to play with, I can get them cheap on ebay, and they still run acceptably fast even @ 200Mhz (well, at least the SMP ones do, I won't buy anything with less than 2 CPUs unless it's a laptop). Right now an Ultra2 Creator running gentoo is my 2nd desktop and my webserver, and my "all-purpose fix anything that's broke in my network from somewhere else outside my firewall assuming it's not a hardware failure sshd machine" The main reason for that last title is that this machine literally never goes down unless a power failure outlasts my UPS. In fact, the reason I'm on the forums right now is that last week (for the first time in over a year) a power failure did outlast my UPS and I figured that since my uptime is quashed anyway I might as well try upgrading to a 2.6 kernel and xorg. Speaking of which, that's not going so well...so if anyone knows of something regarding xorg-x11-6.8.0-r3 and gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.9-r9 that would cause problems I'd be glad to know of it. I'm also going to be upgrading my 2 200Mhz Ultrasparc procs to 2 300Mhz Ultrasparc II procs and going from 256MB to 1GB of ram.
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Grrr, can't think of anything clever right now, I'll go back and edit this later (9/12/2003)
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cyan051
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Joined: 21 Aug 2004
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 09, 2004 9:20 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

why use sparc?
a) learning - its a different platform
b) elegance - x86 might be faster, but sparc is soo much more elegant
c) hot-plugging...my e250 box runs as my personal server...and to have pc hardware of the same class (reliability-wise, on server i don't need that much power anyhow) would be waaay more expensive

to: ibtim13
- xorg works fine
- for kernels newer than 2.6.7 check my thread on it: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=255741
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