[Gllug] Sun hardware/firewall memory

[Andrew Farnsworth]

Adrian McMenamin wrote:

>I suppose this is marginally off topic, but...something to ponder.
>
>The Sparcstation 20 box I bought a few weeks ago for a fiver doesn't
>appear to do much better in published benchmarks than a simple pre-mmx
>pentium system that would have cost 50 - 75% less than the sparc when it
>was manufactured.
>
>So, what is so great about the Sparc that it cost so much more? To be
>honest my impression is that it is a better box than, say the Pentium
>166 that is my firewall (which probably gets better benchmarks), but
>then it does have 192 MB as opposed to the 48 MB on the firewall.
>
>Then, second query: thanks to the end of lifing of a pentium 120 I can
>upgrade the firewall/router to 64 MB. Is it worth the hassle?
>
>The firewall/router does nothing these days, except, err route or not
>route. It doesn't use 48MB, so what do I get out of 64MB
>
>  
>
Generally speaking, Sun boxes had three things going for them.  1) They 
were Workstation class or server class machines which mean they were 
generally built better than their PC counterparts and 2) they had better 
throughput than similar x86 machines and were thus better at being 
servers and of course 3) Solaris is better than windows.  Much of this 
has changed, but some has not, specifically, the better build though 
their throughput is still very good for what they are.

Andrew Farnsworth

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