From: ellis@nova.gmi.edu (R. Stewart Ellis) Subject: Re: How does Linux compare to SUN IPC? Date: 28 Sep 1993 12:10:30 GMT
a228dhal@cdf.toronto.edu (Dhaliwal Bikram Singh) writes:
[deleted]
>The SUN IPC costs many times more than a typical Linux system. That is even
>if you took a 'Maxed Out' PC and put Linux on it you could give the IPC a run
>for its money.
Many times more? First of all, the IPC is a three-year old target, with the
same processor as the SS 1+. You can probably get either one with 12M (max
with 1M simms)on the IPC or 16M on the SS1+, with a 16" color monitor and
200M disk for about $2200-2500. This gives you enet, SCSI, sound and a
monitor that is about the size of some "17 in" monitors I was looking at the
other day at a PeeCee store. On most benchmarks this system will be
somewhat faster than a 386/40, but faster by a factor of three than a PC
system with a generic Tseng 4000 svga card. If people want to compare
486dx2/66 machines, lets make sure they are compared against Classics or
LX's. These machines comes with a minimum of 16M. They also include sound,
enet, faster SCSI, so lets put those on the PC. They may also come with a
minimum of 400M disk, but I am not sure. Last I checked the Classic was
available at an academic discount price of about $3300 with the 15"
monitor. The LX with a 16", I believe 32M of memory, and a 400M disk was in
the low-to-mid $4000 range. I believe these computers would outperform the
high-end PC at about the same price with comparable features at comparable
price. Raw speed is not the only issue, however. On many tasks it will
take you a long time to pay back the investment of time it takes you to port
or find a ported version of a package that compiles out of the box on a Sun.
Linux is a wonderful thing, but if you want access to all the free packages
on the net, SunOS 4.1.3 still provides an edge and the costs are comparable
for comparable performance. Also with SunOS on SPARC you never have to deal
with IRQ's, DMA conflicts or base address conflicts for your enet, asynch,
parallel, mouse,sound and video adapters.
>P.S. I am sorry about your computer, time to upgrade rather than get angry.
No need for most tasks, unless he is like the DOS heads I know who want the
latest hardware so they can do one thing at a time faster. I still find a
386/16 with 8M, slow RLL disk, 8-bit enet and standard ET4000 video adapter,
running SVR4 (slow) to be preferable to a faster PC running Windoze or DOS.
>--
>------------------------
>a228dhal@cdf.toronto.edu
>Bikram Dhaliwal
>(416) 845-4567
-- R.Stewart(Stew) Ellis, Assoc.Prof., (Off)313-762-9765 ___________________ Humanities & Social Science, GMI Eng.& Mgmt. Inst. / _____ ______ Flint, MI 48504 ellis@nova.gmi.edu / / / / / / Gopher,News and sendmail maintainer, all around hack /________/ / / / /