OSDev.org

berkus wrote:

pinged wrote:Another architecture, people might be interested in is SPARC, which is still AFAIK in current production by Sun Microsystems. It's mostly used in servers and quite expensive, but is emulated by QEMU. Sun does, or at least used to, sell SPARC workstations, these unfortunately were also expensive, you can probably buy them second hand from ebay.

As reported by people from Oracle, "SPARC is dead anyway" end of the quote. So only interesting if you're into IT archaeology.

[citation needed]

No, seriously. You'd be surprised how many of Oracle's clients are running the Oracle+Solaris+SPARC stack. Also: UltraSPARC T/T2 (Niagra/Niagra 2) chip multithreading servers are selling like hotcakes.

The other reason I don't think Oracle are killing SPARC is that they just unveiled some benchmark results demonstrating that Oracle+Solaris+SPARC beats the pants off the offerings of their biggest competitors - IBM and HP.

cb88 wrote:@berkus SPARC is hardly dead if the European Space Agency is still buying LEONs and fujitsu sells them independently from Oracle/sun

Besides its kindof hard to kill a processor that is an IEEE standard MIPS has come back to life more than once and it isn't even a standard or free license/sell. Tilera being the latest MIPS reincarnation along with loongson.

SPARC IMO is more attractive in many real ways than MIPS so... I'm not sure why more companies don't jump on that. Personally I'd like to see a lot of things happen with sparc and who knows maybe they will...

You can really say theres a bit of a niche that each architecture fits into:

• x86 is desktops
• POWER/PowerPC is high routers, high end servers and games consoles
• SPARC is high end servers
• MIPS is anything TV related and low end routers
• ARM is mobile phones, PDAs and low end routers

Of them, both ARM and MIPS have also big and medium sized embedded presences (MIPS had a good design win with the M4K and PIC32, but ARM have cornered the rest of the industry). SPARC has a good presence in space, thanks to ESA using Aeroflex Gaisler's LEON implementations of it.

I saw this article and thought of this discussion.

I hope the Linaro project pans out.