rackshack.net is going to be offering Sun Netra X1 servers soon. They are 500 MHz.

Are these substantially more powerful (CPU wise) than the Cobalt RaQ 4is?

It will be much faster!!!

But, you need to remember that they run Solaris instead of Linux, and the CPU is going to be an UltraSparc....

> But, you need to remember that they run Solaris instead of Linux

I've worked with Solaris before; I know enough to install MySQL and mod_perl, which is all that I need. It's kind of a pain to install mod_perl actually; perl has to be compiled a certain way or it'll just segfault.

What significance does having an UltraSparc CPU have?

Originally posted by pmak0
> But, you need to remember that they run Solaris instead of Linux

I've worked with Solaris before; I know enough to install MySQL and mod_perl, which is all that I need. It's kind of a pain to install mod_perl actually; perl has to be compiled a certain way or it'll just segfault.

What significance does having an UltraSparc CPU have?

As the UltraSparc CPU is RISC-based, the speed-per-Mhz will be much higher than on an Intel-compatible processor.

For anyone who cares, RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computing. Another chip which is RISC-based is the PowerPC chip, which is used mainly in Apple Macintosh computers, and which will also be used in high-end Cisco routers.

Hummm...

Sparcs do LESS per instructions, so they can actually be SLOWER at the same clock rate (Mhz). But it is still faster, much better I/O and overall design.

Also, Solaris has a nickname of "Slowaris" by the OpenBSD / FreeBSD crowd :)

This is mostl humor. I believe the Raq has an AMD K6-2 processor, which is a dog. The Sparc is a lot more powerful. I would expect at least 2x the overall load should work (Apache).

And the Sparc processor is a 64 bit processor, not a 32 bit one.

Originally posted by StephenRS
Hummm...

Sparcs do LESS per instructions, so they can actually be SLOWER at the same clock rate (Mhz). But it is still faster, much better I/O and overall design.


While I don't know the ins and outs of the UltraSPARC processor, RISC chips are generally faster per Mhz because they rely on a much more modern instruction set. Whereas Intel-based chips have lots of arcane, long and tedious instructions, RISC processors have just a few very short and clean ones.

Think of it like Chinese vs. English, where English is based on a "reduced instruction set alphabet".

Another major indicator of speed is the pipeline depth. The deeper the pipeline, the less the processor will be able to do per Mhz. While the UltraSPARC is a shorter pipeline than the Intel Pentium 3 or 4 for example, the PowerPC G3 and G4 chips really shine here.