Subject: Re: Sun Ultra 5 UltraSPARC systems for $1,995
To: Erik E. Fair <fair@clock.org>
From: None <joeo@cracktown.com>
List: port-sparc
Date: 10/06/1999 15:39:07
No numbers, but it runs solaris okay.  Will only take a maximum of 512M of
memory.  256 color display (probably a limitation of the solaris frame
buffer device driver for the mach64 chipset display).  The CPU is an
Ultra-IIi which supposedly has a bit less floating point oomph.  It has no
scsi bus (IDE only), I haven't checked to see if you can plug a plain jane
ncr53c825 into it and use that or if you need somthing with openboot
firmware on it.  Solaris has very little in the way of support for with
using commodity PC hardware in these things (PCI cards, IDE cdrom
drives...)

Works okay playing mpeg3's via xmms.

On a pure cost/performance rating you're much better off buying a Celeron
or K6-3 with gobs of memory.

On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, Erik E. Fair wrote:

> http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/19991005/tc/sunmicro_pc_2.html
> 
> http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/Ultra5/
> 
> How does this look on a price/performance basis against the other platforms
> that NetBSD runs on? (yes, I know that the sparc64 port has not yet seen
> formal release)
> 
> 	curious,
> 
> 	Erik
>