Comment by mattbillenstein | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattbillenstein | Hacker News Reader

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mattbillenstein

I think this sorta forgets how slow the cpus were - I was running mostly ASIC design workloads on big Sun hardware in 2001 and we eventually got some x86 boxes that were only 32 bit but could run some of our jobs - and the single-threaded perf of these commodity machines was amazing compared to the Sparc boxes. When x86-64 came around, this was the death of all the Sun hardware in that group.

Also sometime in 2000 I had interviewed at Compaq - the old Alpha group who I think later worked on Itanium at Intel. They were constantly frustrated because they couldn't even get a build from Synopsys of the design tools they needed to run on Alpha and were forced to use Sun hardware they described as "gasping and wheezing" to design their crazy fast cpu.

Sun lost on a bunch of fronts, but I think the amazing thing is they let happen to them what they did to the other big UNIX vendors before - they were eaten from the bottom by faster cheaper hardware.

Same here. I've been in the chip design industry since 1997. Everything was Sun and I was right out of college and convinced my manager to let me use a Linux/x86 machine and I used the savings to buy a large 21" monitor that would run at 2048x1536 resolution and use it as an X terminal to the Suns. Everyone else loved it and did the same.

Around 2000 we started getting some EDA software released on Linux. I remember getting some Linux kernel patches and recompiling the kernel to change the user / kernel split from 2GB / 2GB to 3.5GB user / 0.5GB kernel. But we still needed the 64-bit Suns for some jobs that needed over 4GB RAM. Itanium was really expensive and slow and then AMD released the 64-bit Opteron in 2003. We bought them immediately and never bought another Sun.

My high school in 1992 got a bunch of old Sun3 and first gen Sun4 systems. I absolutely loved them. My dream then was to have my own Sun workstation but they were way too expensive. My other dream was to go to college and then get a job at Sun. I heard about Linux in 1993 and got my Unix system at home. I did work on some Sun UltraSPARC III companion chipsets but Sun couldn't compete on the price to performance ratio with Linux/x86

We had the Sun workstations in college (some with that crazy laser mouse) and I think towards the end of my tenure, most of the labs were switching to linux boxes, but at that same time Solaris x86 actually came out - so on commodity hardware you could run Solaris which was kinda fun.

I did this a little, but the things you could do with actual Linux started to get interesting for me at that time - building routers for our shared home network, hosting Quake servers, doing actual programming with gcc etc and the hardware support was a bit better as I recall.

I also interviewed at Sun in Boston - I think the small group servers group or something - I really liked the engineers I met there and I did consider working there for a minute, but ended up in Silicon Valley which I think was better fit for me.

Yes, I had the same experience while using various Sun computers between 1995 and 2005. During all that decade the Sun computers were reliable, but excessively slow.

Around the beginning of 2006, I had a laptop with a 64-bit AMD Turion CPU and I could run on it Cadence and Mentor tools for ASIC design and the simulations were much faster than on a big Sun multi-processor server. Later that year our team finally got some servers with AMD Opteron, which accelerated dramatically the work in comparison with the traditional Sun servers.

Both SPARC and PowerPC met the same fate. A brilliant ISA done poorly was no match for a poor ISA (x86) done really well.

I had the same experience twice in a few months from those two. Moving from a Sparc server to a Xeon based system, and again when the first Intel Mac Mini's came out and was faster than the dual-G5 systems we had.

I recall a fork/exec heavy shell script at a previous job that ran about an order of magnitude (~25s vs 3s) slower on Solaris/SparcV9 vs Linux/Intel P3 circa 2003. The standard retort back in those days was to rewrite it in Perl.

Thanks for sharing. I just read an article comparing UltraSparc III and Pentium 4. The frequency is the biggest difference, and while the article also highlights a few pros for the Sun processor, like being 64-bit and super scalar, the benchmark shows that P4 has a clear win. I don’t know the price tag then, but I guess Sparc was actually more expensive?

The article is here: https://www.silkstream.net/blog/2006/08/comparison-ultraspar...

The Sun system would have cost several thousand dollars more than a generic Pentium 4 box.

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