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The SPARC architecture is open and fully documented, the only licensing encumbrance is a token administration fee of approximately $100 that helps maintain the

The SPARC architecture is open and fully documented, the only licensing encumbrance is a token administration fee of approximately $100 that helps maintain the organisation that is the steward of the SPARC ISA intellectual property and the fee only applies if you intend to implement your own hardware commercially. I'm constantly amazed at how much work is done to reinvent the wheel as far as ISAs are concerned, SPARC is an excellent platform and has an extremely high level of "shovel ready" hardware designs that you can just ship to a manufacturer and get back hardware. There is even open VHDL to fabricate modern high power CPU designs.

pjc50 10y ago
But the problems here are nothing to do with choice of ISA and everything to do with standardisation of the bringup/boot process. Free/Open Source chips are a lovely idea that doesn't work without a financial sponsor because software can be made and distributed at near-zero marginal cost, including by the end user, but hardware can't.
pfalcon 10y ago
> you can just ship to a manufacturer and get back hardware So, why don't you do that? And if you wonder about others, especially big corporate guys, easy thinking would be that $100 isn't all you need to use SPARC, and it's cheaper for them to use something else. However, if you put it like that, you're a computer geek with zero insight into economics and marketing. The real answer is that it's more profitable for them to use something else than SPARC.