Raspberry Pi 2 vs Sun E450

[fanf]

This afternoon I was talking to an undergrad about email in Cambridge, and showing some old pictures of Hermes to give some idea of what things were like many years ago. This made me wonder, how does a Raspberry Pi 2 (in a Pibow case) compare to a Sun E450 like the ones we decommissioned in 2004?

ETA (2016-02-29): I have embiggened this table to include details of the Raspberry Pi 3. It's worth noting when comparing the IO ports that both models of Raspberry Pi hang the ethernet and four USB ports off one USB2 480 Mbit/s bus. In the Raspberry Pi 3 the WiFi shares the SDIO bus with the SD card slot, and the Bluetooth hangs off a UART. The E450 has a lot more IO bandwidth.

	Raspberry Pi 2	Raspberry Pi 3	Sun Enterprise 450
	(in PiBow case)	☜
	2015 -	2016 -	1997-2002
	£44	☜	$14 000
physical
dimensions	99 x 66 x 30 mm	☜	696 x 448 x 581 mm
volume	196 cm3	☜	181 000 cm3
weight	137 g	☜	94 000 g
CPU
cores	4 x ARM Cortex-A7	4 x ARM Cortex-A53	4 x UltraSPARC II
word size	32 bit	64 bit	64 bit
issue width	2-way in-order	☜	4-way in-order
clock	900 MHz	1200 MHz	400 MHz
GPU	Videocore IV	☜
	250 MHz	300 MHz
Memory
L1 i-cache	32 KB	☜	16 KB
L1 d-cache	32 KB	☜	16 KB
L2 cache	512 KB	☜	4 MB
RAM	1 GB	☜	4 GB
bandwidth	900 MB/s	☜	1778 MB/s
I/O
Network	1 x 100 Mb/s ethernet	1 x 100 Mb/s ethernet	1 x 100 Mb/s ethernet
		1 x 72 Mb/s 802.11n WiFi
		1 x 24 Mb/s Bluetooth 4.1
Disk bus speed	25 MB/s	☜	40 MB/s
Disk interface	1 x MicroSD	☜	5 x UltraSCSI-3
			1 x UltraSCSI-2 1 x floppy 1 x CD-ROM
other	1 x UART 4 x USB 8 x GPIO 2 x I²C 2 x SPI HDMI DSI CSI	☜	2 x UART 1 x mini DIN-8 1 x centronics 3 x 64 bit 66 MHz PCI 4 x 64 bit 33 MHz PCI 3 x 32 bit 33 MHz PCI

Comments

Power draw?

[(Anonymous)]

I'm pretty sure that the Pi would win power draw (low) in this game of Top Trumps.

Re: Power draw?

[bens_dad]

I don't remember whether I ever saw the rules for Top Trumps,
but I think that the E450 would "win" power draw since the number is higher. :-(

[hatter.livejournal.com]

Have you tried sitting a 21" CRT monitor, keyboard, mouse and a mug of coffee on a pibow ? It sits at a terribly unergonomic height, for the instant before it's crushed even flatter, making the E450 a clear winner of the "that's not what a workstation computer means" category.

On the other hand, if I had to rackmount one myself, I'd choose the Pi and maybe some blutack in a heartbeat, rather than reacquaint myself with those terrible Sun brackets and trying to wedge half a tonne of steel and plastic onto them.


the hatter

[lnr]

:)

[gerald_duck]

Such is progress! I still remember spending eight hundred quid on a gigabyte hard drive in 1993.

On the other hand, it's worth bearing in mind that the Raspberry Pi's ethernet interface is via USB and absolutely diabolical, even if nominally 100Mbps like the E450's.

I feel it's also interesting to compare with an Intel NUC such as this one. OK, with 4Gbytes of RAM it would be £130 or so, but if it's not strictly better than the E450, it can't be far off!

Ahhhaaaaa!

[(Anonymous)]

But the Pi 3 has Wifi over SDIO - so that interface needs to be taken into account as well, perhaps as bonded ethernet.