This article is more than 1 year old

The Sun doesn't shine on yacc

BEA bundles and the goodness of x86

Cherrystone delay highlights x86 v RISC War
Sun drops bundle bombshell on BEA

Sun has a hard fight ahead of it. Slowly but surely companies are recognising that x86 technology (in Xeon or AMD MP) form is available that matches or exceeds the performance of very high priced Sun hardware. For example, SPEC (www.spec.org) benchmarks indicate that a 2 processor Xeon at 2Ghz costing roughly $8000 outperforms a 4 processor Sun Enterprise 4500 at roughly $128,000. Better yet, a 2 processor Athlon MP 1800+ box is in a similar performance range and is available for $2000 (just over 1% of the cost of the Sun box). Granted, the Enterprise 4500 is based on Ultrasparc IIs but it is still being sold at the incredible price listed above.

As a consultant, I strongly discourage people from purchasing Sun hardware in favor of examining x86 hardware used in stand-alone or clustered configurations. The price/performance ratio is many times greater and the company has an easy upgrade path open to them in the future. Sun has an armada of drones in the workplace that blindly insist that Sun is "more reliable" (not so according to a Gartner report on Linux versus other *nix platforms and Windows 2000), faster (see SPEC benchmarks, Gartner etc.) and worth every penny (or billions of pennies). Google knows it. I know it. Companies spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on Sun hardware to power their 5000 hit web / database servers do not seem to know it.

Jerry Reid



Thank you for reminding me of the word Elegaic: "Last week an elegiac Linuxgram story told us that the Compaq dream team ...." When I looked it up, I found two meanings, either of which could be a suitable metaphor in the given context. The first relates to a particular variety of distorted dactylic hexameter couplet and the second to elegy, "a song or poem expressing sorrow or lamentation especially for one who is dead."

Did you intend to indicate that the Linuxgram story was written in a doggerel style or that it lamented the impending death of Compaq through ingestion by HP?

Thanks for making my day, in addition to providing that info. on the RISCy wars,

Allan Frankel

Certainly not doggerel, Allan. Cheer up Maureen and take out a Linuxgram sub today.



While talking about some Sun stuff:



However because something is bundled for free, there's no guarantee it ends up getting used. Think yacc(1).

Tsk! I can think of one non-trivial thing that you might use yacc for on a Sun platform: compiling Nethack!

True, most prefer gnu tools, and I must admit I've also never used Sun's yak, oh, and of course, Nethack may be trivial.

But it just goes to show I'm *right*, goddamnit.

Declan Malone

This week's mailbag

'Pimply Assed' programmer's girlfriend demands T-shirt
Bugger Hastings
Zeus - not what the Doctor ordered?
BOFHs to blame for LAN downtime after all
The Sun doesn't shine on yacc
In Jedi We Trust

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like