Thank you to everyone that responded to my question about Sparc hardware
vs. Intel hardware. And not one flame among them. Here are basically the
points of what people said, which is difficult, as there were a lot of
conflicting opinions..
You can not just compare processor speeds. A 300MHz Sparc will destroy a
300MHz PIII. The SPARC is a RISC chip, the PIII is a CISC chip.
The bus is wider on the SPARCs. So disk performance, etc is much better
on the SPARC.
Also, I got replies from several people saying that SolarisX86 was just a
port, it would be better to run something like NetBSD on an Intel
platform.
I also got a few messages from people saying that they run SPARCs in the
backend, and run Intel's for workstations and have been very successful
like that.
Finally, several people said for "heavy duty" applications, like a large
mail server, the SPARC would be the best choice by far, but for smaller
applications an Intel box would handle it just fine.
I know this is all a little vague, but there were a lot of conflicting
opinions and explanations. I'm going to setup a test machine and see how
it actually handles the load before I make any firm decisions.
Thanks again..
Chad Merritt
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