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Long question short, is it possible to buy SPARC and Itanium processors and motherboards without having to resort to buying Sun or HP's horribly expensive prebuilt racks and blades? My google fu doesn't seem to cut it, and the only results I've found are dodgy Ebay sellers selling old boxes without disks or memory that have probably seen better days. I called up Sun and HP, but the results haven't been good, and after a number of calls it's hard to believe that the people who work HP's phone lines would be able to tell a PC from a typewriter.

I know Supermicro used to make EATX Itanic motherboards, but that was a long time ago and they've gone onto EOL. I'm not that desperate at this point, but I've just checked a ton of stores in Toronto and Oshawa, it's all x86. NCIX, Newegg, and CanadaComputers don't have any, and I've even gone into two of CanadaComputers' retail locations to ask in person.

So, anyone got any ideas or suggestions?

There should also be a ton of PPC, ARM and MIPS systems available to play with.

That said, why RISC in particular?

To the best of my knowledge, Intel has never sold Itanium processors or motherboards to the general public, only in bulk quantities to major OEMs. I'd imagine it's a similar situation with most of the other RISC architectures, as the quantities that they sell in are far too low to be worth bothering with support for retail versions. That's not to say you can't get hold of them by, say, specialist suppliers, but you'd probably have a very hard time getting a system based on any reasonably up to date processors put together. Odds are your best bet is to try and find a decent second-hand system from a reputable specialist, and maybe inspect it yourself before committing to purchase.

(Technically, Itanium is VLIW and not RISC, but that's just a slight nitpick... )

What are you looking to do? Its pretty hard to get non-x86 components for most purposes. You might have better luck finding MIPS, ARM or PPC embedded dev boards - they are all fairly common and easy to get, but aren't exactly in a state ready to use as a general purpose computer with an off the shelf operating system. Are you an educational institution? I've gotten some pretty good deals from Sun at my job as a result. For Itanium, check SGI's Remarketed/Recertified section - still a raping, but a much cheaper raping. And they have IA-64 and MIPS systems.

Actually, scratch the SPARC... I love Solaris, but not that much when I already run the x86 version on my computer...

Thanks; I'm not an educational institution, just a student. I'm planning to run either OpenVMS/Alpha or OpenVMS/I64 under a hobbyist license, or if HP does the same hobbyist program for Nonstop, that. Nonstop used to run on PA-RISC and MIPS, but I dunno if those versions are still around, and I dunno how well that old Alpha hardware is going to play with future upgrades.

This is partially for me to use as a hobby machine to experiment with those two other operating systems that run on the Itanium, but it's also going to be spending a lot of its life as a home media server and to host a virtual private network. Even though I can play with OpenVMS on SIMH-VAX or Personal Alpha, I can't really do that much with it when it's hosted on another system - one that's constantly being used for other things and isn't always available.

The SGI remarketed systems sound like an idea... I'll check them out.

If running OpenVMS is your goal, I think you're stuck with an HP/Compaq/DEC branded system. And not all Alphas are capable of running VMS - DEC crippled a bunch so they'd only run NT4 and then sold them cheaper than the fully featured systems. I don't know if VMS will load on any EFI based Itanium system or not. On the Alpha front, you will need the SRM firmware to run anything other than Linux or NT4. If it acts like a PC BIOS and doesn't have the >>> prompt, you're probably out of luck unless you can flash to SRM.

Itanium itself seems to be turning into a dead end - Intel hasn't done much with it in a few years. It hasn't had a clock rate bump since '04, still uses a 90 nm fab process compared to 45nm for current x86 chips, nor has it advanced beyond dual core. Its next revision is also 3 years late.

Good luck finding a real IA-64 or AXP system to play with.

If you ever do want a SPARC for whatever reason, here's some info about them:

Sun hardware is very expensive. A new system from them is definitely not cheap, for example a Netra 5220 can be over $15k, and the Enterprise 5220 isn't much cheaper. Their multi-core (and high number of threads per core) Niagra chip-based servers also tend to stay above $8k, but I recall seeing a T1000 going for as low as $4k recently. All new.

But there are some excellent refurb deals for sun4u-architecture boxes from before 2005.

I'm not sure how much power you actually need out of a SPARC box, but over the last year my manager and I have bought at least 20 old boxes (fully loaded with HDDs, DVDs, extra NIC cards, etc.) from Solar Systems.

Our last batch of seven Sun Fire v120s (1x UltraSPARC IIc 650MHz, 2GB RAM, 2x 36GB, additional quad-fast-ethernet PCI NIC card) came in at about $500 each, half of what their site says. I think our last two Sun Fire v240s (2x UltraSPARC IIIi 1.34GHz, 2x73GB, 8GB RAM) for something around $1,000 per system. Your prices may be higher than these, because we've bought more than a few systems from them over the past few months so we get discounts, but it shouldn't be too bad. You have to call them before they get you an actual quote, but with a bit of haggling you should usually end up decently lower than what their site gives you for "sample pricing".

For alternatives, we've also used AnySystem, or any good Ebay storefront with large numbers of solid ratings will work. For extra hard drives for the servers, we tended to stick with Global Micro.

So you can definitely get them fairly cheap as refurbished boxes, but don't expect anything fast or modern. The type of box you need depends on what will you be doing.

And stay away from any "Netra" servers. You're not a Telecom company, and you don't need NEBS-compliant hardware, nor the surcharge that NEBS-certified equipment tends to have. In Sun's case, any sun4u-architecture "Netra" server will have it's equivalent "Sun Fire" brand of server that has essentially the same hardware configuration (although some exceptions do apply, i.e. Netra 210 vs. Sun Fire 210). Also, I'd recommend avoiding any Sun Fire box that uses Fibre Channel drives. There's just simply too much work involved when swapping out FC drives for them to be worth it in a home/student environment. Stick with SCSI-based servers.

But if you want to actually find the individual parts and buy them, good luck. I've noticed that it's just easier and less time-consuming to buy the entire box, if the parts in question were built prior to 2004, give-or-take. Resellers' prices on parts can be outrageous sometimes, while the best way to get replacement parts from Sun themselves is to have a SunSolve account and/or Support Contract with them. Even then, the older the equipment, the lower the chance they'll have what you need. Probably won't get anything from them for hardware that's been EOL'd or EOSL'd.

In the end, the production volumes for SPARC parts and systems are small compared to the gigantic x86 market, so you'll find that things aren't very cheap or widely available.

Davey wrote:Thanks; I'm not an educational institution, just a student. I'm planning to run either OpenVMS/Alpha or OpenVMS/I64 under a hobbyist license, or if HP does the same hobbyist program for Nonstop, that. Nonstop used to run on PA-RISC and MIPS, but I dunno if those versions are still around, and I dunno how well that old Alpha hardware is going to play with future upgrades.

I don't expect Nonstop to be available under a hobbyist program; it's mostly used in mission-critical applications (paired with appropriate hardware). Alpha is pretty much dead, dead, dead.

This is partially for me to use as a hobby machine to experiment with those two other operating systems that run on the Itanium, but it's also going to be spending a lot of its life as a home media server and to host a virtual private network. Even though I can play with OpenVMS on SIMH-VAX or Personal Alpha, I can't really do that much with it when it's hosted on another system - one that's constantly being used for other things and isn't always available.

If you really want to use a home media server or VPN you might as well run one of the more common operating systems (e.g. Linux, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, etc.) that has frequent support.