Limiting the selection to machines I actually own, I'd say - for the moment - that my SPARC Enterprise T1000 is my favourite Sun machine, although I do not use it much recently (to some degree because of its noise).
Reasons? Well, main reason it's so small and still offers a lot: up to 32 threads for example. Yeah sure, those are lightweight, but combined these beat e.g. the two threads of an Intellistation POWER 285 with single-core 2.1 GHz POWER5+ with ease:
Code:
<i>
</i>root@power-285:~# time 7z b
7-Zip 16.02 : Copyright (c) 1999-2016 Igor Pavlov : 2016-05-21
p7zip Version 16.02 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,64 bits,2 CPUs BE)
BE
CPU Freq: 1027 1031 1031 1031 1031 1032 1032 1031 1034
RAM size: 1862 MB, # CPU hardware threads: 2
RAM usage: 441 MB, # Benchmark threads: 2
Compressing | Decompressing
Dict Speed Usage R/U Rating | Speed Usage R/U Rating
KiB/s % MIPS MIPS | KiB/s % MIPS MIPS
22: 2224 148 1464 2164 | 28845 198 1242 2463
23: 2144 152 1434 2185 | 28514 198 1245 2468
24: 2081 159 1410 2238 | 28148 198 1247 2471
25: 2037 162 1436 2326 | 27844 198 1250 2478
---------------------------------- | ------------------------------
Avr: 155 1436 2228 | 198 1246 2470
Tot: 177 1341 2349
real 0m45.381s
user 1m12.655s
sys 0m0.659s
<I>
Don't mind the wrong CPU clock measurement, I often see this for POWER or PowerPC gear when used with the 7z benchmark. Either the CPU is clocked down during the measurement (which I don't believe for a POWER processor) or 7z is just plain wrong.</I>
EDIT: Reduced font size, because 85 came out huge after the migration from the old forum software.
Code:
<i>
</i>root@t1000:~# time 7z b
7-Zip 16.02 : Copyright (c) 1999-2016 Igor Pavlov : 2016-05-21
p7zip Version 16.02 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,64 bits,32 CPUs BE)
BE
CPU Freq: 949 949 949 949 949 949 949 949
RAM size: 7958 MB, # CPU hardware threads: 32
RAM usage: 7060 MB, # Benchmark threads: 32
Compressing | Decompressing
Dict Speed Usage R/U Rating | Speed Usage R/U Rating
KiB/s % MIPS MIPS | KiB/s % MIPS MIPS
22: 4479 2021 216 4358 | 64980 2926 189 5542
23: 4819 2080 236 4910 | 66559 2947 196 5759
24: 4795 2098 246 5156 | 47476 2811 148 4167
25: 4584 2087 251 5235 | 32741 3143 93 2914
---------------------------------- | ------------------------------
Avr: 2071 237 4915 | 2957 157 4595
Tot: 2514 197 4755
real 6m3.025s
user 120m38.812s
sys 0m43.018s
And who would have thought that? :-D We won't talk about floating-point performance, the UltraSPARC T1 was not meant for that. In addition you can use up to 32 GiB of memory and a maximum of two SATA/SAS HDDs or SSDs. Plus the T1000 supports hardware partitioning. More than enough for playing around. Coming back to its small form factor (1 rack unit high and about as deep as an Ultra 10), I mean look at its system board (e.g. <URL url="https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/more_disk_s_fun">
here), small but loaded with goodies (remote control (via ALOM), four 1 Gbps NICs, one PCIe x8 slot). Yet this seems to be the only UltraSPARC Tx driven machine of such small size ever released, which is a real pity (a <URL url="http://www.trygve.com/blog_2012_04.html">
T3120 sadly was never released). I'd say the T1000 is a dream machine for web serving. Use in loud environments only. ;-)