I like SPARCs. I find them to be far superior to the x86 processors on, at least, a theoretical level, if not also on a practical level. Having said that I will likely never get one, unless a meteor hit me in the head with one. The reason is simple — they are, by far, too expensive. The cheapest SPARC based computer I could find anywhere costs $14,750.00, which is about 4 times more than I would have to pay for a computer I could assemble using off the shelve components (and not the cheapest ones), resulting in a computer which is superior to the SPARC in every way. The SPARC I’m refering to is the cheapest one from SUN (or is that Oracle now-adays?): Listing price is $14,795.00, which buys you one (1) 2.75 GHz SPARC64 VII 2-core processor with a total of 4 threads, with 8 GiB of RAM, a total of 292 GB of HDD on two drives @ 10k RPM and a few other things (including Solaris 10 — but who cares?). I’m assuming some sort of support plan is included — if not, I can’t really justify the price at all and would consider this theft at broad daylight.
The system I propose as a superior replacement consists of the following components: two (2) Quad core, hyper threaded Xeon L5630 @ 2.33 GHz. This is slightly slower (in hertz) than the SPARC64 VII, but on the up side, there are two of them, and both have twice as many threads as the SPARC, for a total of 4 times as many threads. This won’t cost you more than $1500 total. The motherboard is an Intel Server Board S5500BC, which should cost you about $400 — this lacks a SAS controller, so you will have to get one. A SAS controller can be had for about $150. Faster, bigger drives with more cache can be had for about $200 per drive — if you want to use them for RAID 1, which is what I would recommend, that will be a total of $400 or so. 2 GiB sticks of paired DDR3 RAM modules running @ 1800 MHz can be bought for $150 per pair — a total of 8 GiB costs $600. The only thing missing is a case and a power supply — the case can, again, be had for about $100-$150 (I’m assuming $150) and the power supply will cost about $300 — the total is ($1500 + $400 + $150 + $400 + $600 + $150 + $300) $3500, or about a quarter of what the SPARC was listed at. Personally, I would much rather have four servers than one, and if those four servers are all better than the one server I could get otherwise, I would definitely pick the four servers.
Components I used to find the price:
Intel Xeon L5630, Intel Server Board S5500, Kingston HyperX 2 x 2 GB @ 1800 MHz DDR3, Fujitsu 450 GB (SAS HDD @ 1000 RPM), LSI MegaRAID SAS (SAS Controller), Ikonik Zaria A10 (case), OCZ Z Series 1KW power supply.
