Sun 4s - good for development - poor for production?

[Timothy H Panton.]

This note is really an anguished moan at Sun to smarten their act in 2
crucial areas: 

	1) Floating point C performance.
	2) Pre-Sales Support.


I do software consultancy, and one of my main clients have spent over 100k
pounds in the last year on Unix hardware. I use a Sun to develop the
software they run. They run it on HPs and (in the near future) MIPS-based
workstations. Why? Well each time they check the market they look at the
Sun offerings and turn them down. The key reason for this is that they run
code that is very floating-point heavy - particularly log() exp(). Sun
benchmarks at about 1/2 the speed of the equivelent from other makes. So
for example the SparcStation 1 gives a time of 20sec for a particular
benchmark as against 10sec on the DecStation 3100. This is wierd, as the
leaflets say they should be much closer than that. The bottom line seems
to be that no one has bothered to optimize libm.a - or the publicity is a
lie. 

Another issue that is important this client is single precision.  For a
lot of the log() exp() calls single precision is quite good enough.  About
6 months ago both Sun and HP were asked if their machine could let us do
this. Sun said "No". HP said "We'll have a look" then later "Yup".  I
noticed the other day as I was browsing math.h that Sun do indeed support
this, in fact better than HP do. If this was an isolated incedent I'd have
kept quiet, but it is symptomatic (in the South of the UK at least) of
Sun's arrogance. A sort of -"well what else could you buy?" attitude.  I
could give other examples.

The reason all this bugs me is that I like developing software on Suns, 3
times in the last year I've debugged a problem by shipping the code to a
Sun to use tools which HP don't have. Each case saved a good week's work.
I guess this is fine if Sun are happy with 10% of the market, but the real
money is spent on production, not development machines. 

BTW My client also advises their clients on hardware purchases about 500k
over the last year, worth a few days smartening up libm ?

Tim.

Tim Panton, Westhawk Ltd.       (Bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.)
Paper: Westhawk Ltd. 26 Rydal Grove, Helsby, Cheshire, WA6 OET. UK.         
Phone: +44 92822574             uucp : ..!mcvax!ukc!cam-cl!westhawk!thp