Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 15:02:06 -0500 (EST) From: Alfred Perlstein <bright@rush.net> To: "Mark L. Holloway" <mholloway@flashmail.com> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD & AMD K7 Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.990617145011.14320n-100000@cygnus.rush.net> In-Reply-To: <37694ee0.1e4.0@flashmail.com>
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On Thu, 17 Jun 1999, Mark L. Holloway wrote: > Does anyone know if FreeBSD will be working ok with the K7? It has attractive > specs and seems to slowly bridge the gap between Intel and DEC Alpha. > > > Also, can anyone please tell me why in Gods name people who use Sun Solaris > insist that a Sparc 10/Dual 51/128MB is still better than a Pentium III/500 > with 128MB? They claim it's due to the throughput but when I checked the specs > on a Sparc 10 and 20 the bus speeds are 15 mhz and 25 mhz respectively. For > the price of a used Sparc 10 you can get a PIII 450/500 which I would think > it smokes a legacy Sparc. Also, if the legacy Sparc is so great then how come > Yahoo, Mp3.com, Gamespot, Link Exchange, Hotmail, and so many others are using > FreeBSD? I'm confused. They keep boasting that Intel throughput sucks even > with todays new hardware it doesn't compare to a Sparc 10. Is it because a > used Sparc still costs so much? I'd swear an Intel PII/III would have to run > circles around a SS10. These are what I like to refer to as "hardware kiddies", give them a nice looking box, that's maybe rackmountable or perhaps purple and they go drooling all over it. Doing some compiling on an Ultra 170/e vs a K6-233 was pretty close but the K6 seemed to kick the sparc's butt. The sparc also costed about 3k while the PC probably goes for under a grand nowadays. PCs also are so cheap that it's almost foolish not to have a couple of spares, forget about hot-swappable parts, just swap the entire box.. On the other hand, sparcs seem to be built a whole lot better, they are geared to the performance over price people, so reliability is pretty good, also they are built for serving unlike PCs which are desktops hacked to hell into being servers. All sparcs that I know of will boot off of serial, meaning you don't even need a keyboard/monitor to use them from the get-go, just a terminal, or term server. Most PC, even "server PCs" won't even boot if you remove the keyboard unless you go hunting into the bios. I prefer PCs, they come within 10% of the high end SUN/SGI machines at about 10-50% of the cost, meaning I don't put my company's eggs all into one 25k sparc basket. :) Of course if I had VC.... I would probably go sparc, but only if I had enough to keep several spares around. :) Actually I think I'm too much of a BSD bigot to do that, just heap more FreeBSD boxes into the cluster. :) High end Sun/SGI is great, but not in terms of price over performance. -Alfred To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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