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Grex > Coop12 > #94: Minutes March 21, 2002 Board Meeting | |
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| Author |
Message |
| 12 new of 136 responses total. |
cross
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response 125 of 136:
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May 2 16:25 UTC 2002 |
Regarding #122; The extra cost might be 50 or 100 dollars. Still less
than a Sun system. Who cares what comes ``standard'' on a Sun if it's
twice as expensive? Buying a computer is kind of like buying a car;
you rarely get the ``standard'' model, but instead opt for one with the
leather seats, A/C, AM/FM radio and CD player, etc, etc. Buying a Honda
is still cheaper than buying a Cadillac, and the Honda is just as
reliable and useful, if not as ``good'' in some other abstract sense.
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mdw
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response 126 of 136:
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May 3 02:38 UTC 2002 |
Dell makes some very nice machines. Unfortunately, none of them are
AMD-based.
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gull
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response 127 of 136:
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May 3 03:52 UTC 2002 |
That may change soon, though. Dell is apparently expressing interest in the
Opteron processor.
Still, there's a reason Dell hasn't sold AMD stuff in the past. As nice as
AMD's processors are, they really haven't been featured in many
server-quality motherboards. They seem to mostly aim for the retail PC
maket.
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devnull
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response 128 of 136:
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Jun 1 04:29 UTC 2002 |
Re #119: I'm confused about why sbus is coming up. I was under the impression
that if the next grex is a sparc, it's going to be a PCI machine anyway.
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cross
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response 129 of 136:
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Jun 1 22:43 UTC 2002 |
Regarding #128; Marcus has stated in the garage group that he would like
to see grex stay on SBus based hardware for at least one more, err, life-
cycle revision.
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gull
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response 130 of 136:
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Jun 1 22:59 UTC 2002 |
Why? I'm sure he has a good reason, but to me it seems like chaining
ourselves to an orphaned platform. Spares are going to get rarer and more
expensive with time. (Just find an Amiga user and ask them what an Ethernet
card costs these days, for an example.)
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i
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response 131 of 136:
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Jun 2 02:59 UTC 2002 |
Being a 501(c)(3) with modest needs, a sinking platform is great. All
the rats abandoning it will give us their no-longer-needed stuff to get
tax deductions.
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mdw
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response 132 of 136:
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Jun 2 05:47 UTC 2002 |
I don't remember saying we ought to stay with sbus hardware one more
cycle. I think there are certain *conveniences* with staying with sbus
hardware (because we have a lot, so it's even cheaper than cheap pci
stuff) but I don't think it's any big deal if we switch to pci. I think
it's actually rather likely that the next *production* machine we get
will be pci bus -- so the ultra suns that cross donated to grex may well
be our last generation of sbus hardware.
Past the ultra-1/ultra-2, the next newer hardware would be something
like a ultra-5 workstation or a 220R. Both are ultrasparc II at higher
clock rates (1.5 - 2+ the performance of the ultra-1) and have pci bus.
The built-in scsi support on the ultra-1 is capable of about 10 Mb/s,
using about 1% cpu. The ultra-5 has built-in IDE support - at a quick
check, it can transfer at about 6.8 Mb/s, using "0%" CPU, not bad. Of
course, with IDE, you only get 2 drives and you don't get overlapped
seeks. It would be interesting to see if we can improve upon that 6.8
figure by sticking in a faster IDE drive, but it would still be
attractive to drop an aha 2940 (or whatever) to get multiple spindles
and overlapped seeks. The 220R supports scsi right off; so it's likely
to combine the best of both worlds.
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cross
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response 133 of 136:
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Jun 2 22:27 UTC 2002 |
Regarding #133; I quote from post #12 in thread #128 in the garage group:
So far as sbus vs. pci bus - if we were located in Nebraska and
starting out from scratch, pci bus might well make more sense.
We're located near a major university/research center, so used sun
stuff is easier to find, and we already have a lot of sbus stuff.
All things being equal, it's somewhat advantageous to stick with
sbus for one more hardware generation. There's nothing wrong
with pci bus though and clearly the next machine we get after
this will be pci bus, so if that's what we find for this next
machine, that's fine too. One convenient thing about sun's
is they already come with a fair amount of built-in hardware.
I have a Ultra-5 in my office with 3 empty pci bus slots, because
everything it needs is on the motherboard. On the down side,
at the same time sun switched from sbus, they also switched to
ide, so my machine doesn't have scsi.
I interpret this to mean that you'd just as soon stick with sbus as switch
to PCI at the moment.
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mdw
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response 134 of 136:
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Jun 3 08:53 UTC 2002 |
All things being equal - sure. I'm not sure how much post-ultra-1/2
sbus hardware sun actually made. They still seem to have sbus capable
hardware in their catalog, so I gather it's possible to buy a brand new
high end machine with sbus. My guess though is that after the
ultra-1/2, sbus stuff gets pretty scarce.
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cross
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response 135 of 136:
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Jun 3 16:20 UTC 2002 |
Well, they still sell ultra-2's as high-end servers. Those are SBus
machines. I guess some of their high end UE stuff is probably still
SBus, if for no other reason than that it was designed before they
switched to PCI. Still, I'd think that PC hardware is really the way
to go. Especially if you're talking instead about a machine like an
Ultra-5 or Ultra-10.
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cross
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response 136 of 136:
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Jul 5 21:17 UTC 2002 |
I started on a list of what my guess of things the next grex machine must
do are. Well, that's an over-statement; I compiled a list of my guess as
to what network services the next grex must provide are. This is in the
garage group, thread #136. It'd be nice to get some discussion going on
this.
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