[dundee] Opinions on the Sun Ultra 24 Box - Good bang-per-buck?

[Rick Moynihan]

2008/4/25 Andrew Clayton <andrew at digital-domain.net>:
> On Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:54:29 +0100 (BST), Lee Hughes wrote:
>
>  > yeah, but will the software (os/app's) take advantage of all that
>  > threading capability?
>
>  I'll use the terms cores and cpu's interchangeably below..
>
>  Of course. Linux itself is quite capable of dealing with many cpu's,
>  with support for 4096 cpu's currently being worked on for merging from
>  the folks at SGI.
>
>  You want real world examples,
>
>  Compiling is an obvious one with make supporting parallel compiling
>  natively, e.g make -j <num cpu's + 1>
>
>  If you use a source based distribution, you'll like many cores...
>
>  Saw a recent reference to an IBM machine that does 3K/sec (that's 3
>  kernel builds a second)
>
>  Grip supports multiple cpu's for encoding audio.
>
>  I'm sure games will start supporting multiple cores, in fact IIRC some
>  version of quake does/did.
>
>  Any java app you use...
>
>  And just having the capacity that comes from having multiple cores,
>  video encoding not interfering with your compilation for example.
>
>  That heavy javascript site causing firefox to hammer one of your cores.
>
>  So yeah, Linux has been ready for this for a long time and as multiple
>  cores become more prevalent, I'm sure more apps will be written
>  specifically to take advantage.

This is all true, but with the current state of hardware  (at least
under x86) I suspect that simply adding more CPUs & cores leads
diminishing returns, due to problems with shared memory; i.e. cache
and memory flushes under the hood.  Sure an 8/16 core machine sounds
great, but I'm not sure if I could ever keep all the cores busy during
my normal workload.

A single quad-core CPU where each core screams speed, seems like a
better investment than going for 2 processors.  The question is
whether there's a noticable performance benefit in choosing the Quad
Extreme QX9650 over the Quad Q9300?

>  > I'd personally go for something like this.
>  >
>  > single core....but over clock the hell out of it...

This might be the best option for home users, but some of the software
we're developing will almost certainly benefit from multiple cores.
So I'm commited to choosing a multi-core processor.  Also I don't
really have the time at work to tweak my hardware for better
performance, so I want something that'll fly in it's standard
configuration.

Back to my main question though... does anyone know of anything
comparable to the Sun Ultra 24 at a substantially cheaper price??

I just found the following review here:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/10/25/43TC-sun-ultra24-workstation_2.html

and all other comments seem to be very positive, though I've not yet
found anything that's really comparable (though I've not really looked
yet).

The only other option I've briefly considered was the macpro with the
idea that it might be more flexible as I'd theoretically be able to
run Linux, Solaris, Windows and OSX.  But it seems that the hardware's
currently a little problematic for booting Linux and I really don't
have the time to struggle with software installations.

R.