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Comment by ryao

10 years ago

The problems were Sun's failure to recognize that cheap IBM PC clones would disrupt them like they disrupted mainframes and Sun not trying hard enough to overcome Wintel's network effect. Sun needed to die shrink old designs to get something that they could fabricate at low cost and compete on price. Such a thing would have canabalized Sun workstation sales, which might be why they never did it.

8 comments

ryao

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nickpsecurity  10 years ago

Could be. It's gone now, though.

  • Annatar  10 years ago

    You again! (:-) You know that the VHDL code for UltraSPARC T1 and T2 has been open sourced? If I had enough knowledge about synthesizing code inside of an FPGA, I would be building my own SPARC-based servers like there is no tomorrow!

    As long as the code for those processors remains free, and a license to implement a SPARC ISA compliant processor only costs $50, the SPARC will never really, truly be gone, especially not for those people capable of synthesizing their own FPGA's, or even building their own hardware.

    Some people did exactly that, a while back. Too bad they didn't turn their designs into ready-to-buy servers.

    • nickpsecurity  10 years ago

      " You know that the VHDL code for UltraSPARC T1 and T2 has been open sourced?"

      That was exciting. It could do well even on a 200MHz FPGA given threading performance. Then, use eASIC's Nextreme's to convert it to structured ASIC for better speed, power-usage, and security from dynamic attacks on FPGA. That it's Oracle and they're sue-happy concerns me. I'd read that "GPL" license very carefully just in case they tweaked it. If it's safe, then drop one of those badboys (yes, the T2) on the best node we can afford with key I/O. Can use microcontrollers on the board for the rest as they're dirt cheap. Same model as Raptor's as I explained in another comment.

      Alternatively, use Gaisler as Leon3 is GPL and designed for customization. Simple, too. Leon4 is probably inexpensive compared to ARM, etc.

      "SPARC ISA compliant processor only costs $50, the SPARC will never really, truly be gone, especially not for those people capable of synthesizing their own FPGA's,"

      Yep.

      "Too bad they didn't turn their designs into ready-to-buy servers."

      Not quite a server but available and illustrates your point:

      http://www.gaisler.com/index.php/products/systems/gr-rasta?t...

      Btw, I found this accidentally while looking for a production version of OpenSPARC:

      http://palms.ee.princeton.edu/node/381