3 ms·
The industry doesn't produce readily available SPARC systems, except for NEC and that European space chip consortium, plus including what's left of Sun inside L
by cm3 11y ago
The industry doesn't produce readily available SPARC systems, except for NEC and that European space chip consortium, plus including what's left of Sun inside Larry's dungeon, but SPARC is still evolving and is in a similar space as POWER. There are certain workloads that benefit very much from POWER and SPARC, but it's not your general purpose system that works well in a common denominator kinda way. There just aren't enough SPARC and POWER systems around to be economically viable as a x86 alternative, but technologically they're good choices for many scenarios.
- tracker1 11y agoThe issue is that mfg of cpus at scale is very costly, and short of a large scale, the per-unit cost to cover tooling is higher... lower margins, less profit, higher cost to the customers. Per-Unit cost, and relative throughput is why Intel rules the roost for the most part, even in server. I've looked at some of the costs of ARM servers, and they're way more expensive than they should be (compared to the cost going into phones)... I would think that may eventually become competitive... though Intel has a bit of room to lower pricing and still make money to compete.
- cm3 11y agoBut the chip you get in a smart phone is not what you get in a server. For one, I/O is very different and it includes things like 40Gb network silicon.