
Raspberry Pi vs. SPARCstation 20: Fight - ingve
http://eschatologist.net/blog/?p=266
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themartorana
I cut my teeth on Sun SPARCstations. They were my first serious computer love,
introduced to me at Rutgers University a good *%#+ years ago. All I had owned
at home was a couple Commodore 64s and a 286 my dad had for work.

Buried in the basement of a building on campus, with huge black and white CRTs
(21" or bigger), and laser mice that required a mirror-polished mouse pad, a
nice upper-class student took pity on me and introduced me to UNIX when I
started bothering him to share his .xinitrc file with me (his prompt was
decidedly cooler than mine, and back then, Pine was how we got email, so
everyone got to use a terminal a little bit, on Mac, Windows, or UNIX. That
was neat, because even the least-interested students were semi-comfortable
sitting down at one of the UNIX machines).

Sorry, not a thing to do with the article, it just sparked a warm memory.
They're why I use a Mac now - it's the prettiest UNIX (IMHO).

Every now and again I'll open Pine just for the nostalgia of it.

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nickpsecurity
Let's see it vs a SPARC with same clockrate and/or SMP for same no of cores.
Still not apples to apples but closer. Maybe some Ultrasparc 3's or something.

Throw in some Alphas for good measure. Then put critical routunes in PALcode.
See what happens. ;)

~~~
coderjames
I wondered about that too. In some of those benchmarks, the Pi was only 4x
faster or so. But the 700 MHz Pi clock is about 12x faster than the 60 MHz
SPARC. So in a same clock rate test (e.g. a theoretical 700 MHz SuperSparc),
it seems like the SPARC should be faster.

I have an SMP SparcStation 20 in the closet (either 2- or 4-way, can't
remember). I should dig it out and run those benchmarks myself.

~~~
eschaton
If you can, I'd love to see those benchmarks not just on SunOS 4.1 or Solaris,
but on something like NetBSD 7.0 using a recent GCC or clang. It might make
for a good comparison since the hardware is close to what the benchmark was
originally run on.

And if you're in the Bay Area and looking for a home for that system… I looked
into getting one as I was writing, and while Weird Stuff and MemoryX have OK
prices on CPU boards and memory, I was seeing prices of about $300 for a
working SS20!

~~~
nickpsecurity
That's same range as eBay. Many of the old, RISC machines hold their value
well. The SunBlade workstations still go for around $1000 if loaded. The
AlphaServers are holding out well across the board:

[http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_odkw=Sunblade+workstation&_o...](http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_odkw=Sunblade+workstation&_osacat=0&_from=R40&_trksid=p2045573.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.Xalphaserver.TRS0&_nkw=alphaserver&_sacat=0)

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ChuckMcM
I read these and I'm always "but, but, wait!" And I recognize being on the
other side of an argument I was on when the first microcomputers came out,
where people with "real" computers would tell me all the reasons my
microcomputer wasn't as good as a real computer and I was telling them it was
good enough for what I wanted it to do.

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diminish
Would be interesting to compare first and last iPhone here too.

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theinternetman
real question is how did X11 performance get so bad that the Pi feels so weak

~~~
Lerc
1152x900 8bit = 1,036,800 bytes on screen

1920x1080 24bit = 6,220,800 bytes on screen

So for starters, a lot of people are trying to push around more, larger,
pixels.

Some years ago I did some experiments with the OLPC-XO essentially analysing
this exact problem. Modern software on a platform weaker then current Entry-
Level.

Analysing the overhead in printing a terminal text to a screen, I found a
process that output a great deal of text but >dev/null took 1.5 seconds and
tried a couple of different terminals.

    
    
        7 seconds using bitmapped fonts 
        30 seconds using xft
        6 minutes 34 seconds using vte (Pango/Cairo)
    

That's a lot of overhead. You get unicode, scalable fonts and extras but it
all comes with a cost. Most of that cost isn't intrinsic to the additional
capabilities, but just an accumulation of minor inefficiencies because the
result was ok on the machines we were using at the time.

~~~
lttlrck
Larger pixels?

~~~
bprieto
I think he meant larger in the sense that 24 bits is larger than 8 bits

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bjelkeman-again
I used to have a SPARCstation SLC, monitor and CPU in one. It was plenty fast.
Apparently it was 20 MHz compared to the SPARCstation 20's 60 MHz. Now I have
a Pi lying around doing nothing, but going to control a Nixie tube setup for
some counters. Times change.

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codezero
Pretty wild that this was top end in 1994. I wonder what the benchmark versus
a 100MHz Pentium, also available in 1994 (I had one at the time) would look
like.

~~~
eschaton
You can probably see exactly that kind of benchmark in BYTE issues from
1994-1997 at archive.org, I think they did a couple benchmark roundups of PC
UNIX back then.

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zobzu
the pi is also faster than
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC)
nothing to be surprised about o.O

today's pi is going to be rather obsolete in 20 years, thanksfully, we're
still progressing :)

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buserror
Well the SPARC ethernet is BOUND to be a lot better than the Pi's ;-)

~~~
fit2rule
Good luck plugging in any peripherals to that SPARC machine though ..

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buserror
Heheh yeah I'll look smart with my USB keyboard ;-)

On the other hand, for the time the sparcs were pretty advanced, high speed
SCSI (whoohoo ;-)), they had the famous RS422 ports that were also on the macs
and allowed (synchronous) 2Mb/s.

I had a Sun 3/80 back then in 1991 or so, given to me by a Sun rep when the
SPARC came out; it was already fantastic hardware to have in my bedroom! I'm
still hooked on the Sun hi-dpi console font (still present in linux)

~~~
fit2rule
I was more of an SGI guy, having cut my Unix teeth on Risc/OS on a MIPS Magnum
pizza box, still got my O2, wish I still had my stack of Indy's .. but I can
nevertheless understand the love for these old machines. What a pity those
guys didn't compete for the pocket, eh?

