[Sussex] SPARCBooks, Powerbooks and bog standard laptops

[Geoff Teale]

Here I am a day later and a lot more informed:

Steve wrote:
------------
> I've been following this SPARCbook thread.

Glad to hear it :)  As the SPARCSpert on the list I was kinda hoping for
your input.

> I would be wary of the SPARCbook.  I had the pleasure of 
> playing with one
> just after they first come out, back before the ULTRAsparc 
> hit the streets.
> The company I was working for paid a fortune for it, five 
> figure sum, and 
> compared with the Sparc 20 (it had the same CPU & Graphics 
> card - which is
> why we needed that model) it was slow.  If I remember right 
> they had resuced
> the CPU speed to provide a bit more power.  Battrey life 
> sucked to (come to
> think of it is was about the same as my Vaio - then then I 
> didn't buy that
> for it's battery life either).

Yup.  This is consitant with my info.  I don't have Tadpoles prices yet but
the Naturtech beasts start at £3,995!!!!  That's for an UltraSPARC IIi @
400mhz, 256MB of RAM and a 10GB HD.  Maximum battery life is 2.5 hours.

For that price I could by a lowend Sun Workstation (still slightly higher
spec than the laptop) _and_ a top end x86 laptop or powerbook. 

I was kind of hoping they'd come in at slightly above £2000 (I knew they
weren't going to be cheap) - but really four grand is a tad on the steep
side.
 
> Okay, I know that on a single CPU system Linux flys compared 
> with Linux,
> but that same would be true on the iBook too wouldn't it?  I 
> can see you
> spending a lot of money and not getting that much for it.

Actually I think Apple's machines are no longer good value for money in
terms of bang for buck. For a long time I've defended Apple and said that
it's just that they pitch to a premium market and therefore they don't
produce budget machines (so as not to devalue the brand) - but right now I'm
seeing stats come in from Gentoo users who are compiling everything fully
optomised, and it's the P4 and Athlon XP users who are getting the best
performance/price ratio.  The truth of the matter is that if you decide to
run OS X than a G4 powerbook is a good buy, but as a LINUX platform you're
spending a lot of money for a nice case and a big screen (both selling
points), ironically that 17" screen could end up being more of a hinderance
than a benefit - try using that in a cramped space.  

The latest thing I've seen is that Hyperthreading P4's are where the big
performance gains are for LINUX - hopefully this will turn up in the laptop
chipsets soonish.
 
> So dump the shipped OS and install Linux.  I'll run fast I'm sure.

See above - thats fine if you already have the hardware, but it doesn't make
economic sense to do this from scratch. plus Apple hardware support under
LINUX is _much_ worse than PC support.
  
> But you won't get that with Solaris.  Any way they ship with Gnome now
> or will soon - it can be downloaded for Solaris 8.

Yup, aware of that.
 
> I would have though that Apple ship more of their laptops 
> that Tadpole do.

They definitely do!

> If you like the looks and the hardward (and you can afford 
> it) then that's
> the laptop for you.  Let's face it in laptop land there is no 
> way of getting
> one without paying for an OS these days.

Hmm.. www.novatech.co.uk or www.dnuk.com will do that for you !

> If you're going into that then you have even more problems.  
> I can remember
> Sun's presentation to me years ago when they first announced 
> 64-bit that
> on (HP I think) use a different 64 bit number format.  This 
> has an effect
> when bit slicing, and maksing of hardware registers.  This 
> should only 
> really be and issue for kernel hackers.  App-land hackers 
> should write in
> a way that don't cause problems - portablity is normally more 
> important 
> for applications than abolulte raw speed - of course there are always
> exceptions.

Yup, this is along the same lines as what I was saying.  Funnily enough it
is difficult to write an ICCCM compliant window manager for a 64-bit system
because the standard calls for 32-bit unsigned integers where you are going
to recieve 64-bit ones from X... this is one reason it would have been nice
to have a 64-bit system to work on.

-- 
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk
tealeg at member.fsf.org

"Windows is for cheaters"
- Bruce Springsteen "Rosalita"




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