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SPARC was the solution. It's open and royalty free and was sold by multiple vendors. Add to that Open Firmware and you're done. It's also not the hacked up turd
by cjsuk 9y ago
SPARC was the solution. It's open and royalty free and was sold by multiple vendors. Add to that Open Firmware and you're done. It's also not the hacked up turd that x86-64 is or the fragmented mess that ARM is.
Problem is it's dead.
Going out on a limb here, but we can solve this with another layer of abstraction in the long term. We need to develop a fully portable open source virtual machine model (think p-code machine) that is portable and make that the canonical hardware abstraction. That makes all vendors irrelevant if they can't comply with it and opens the market to new hardware vendors with different sales models to provide an optimised hardware implementation of that abstraction. The incumbents (ARM, Intel, AMD) can't sell a security model if the abstraction denies them that ability. Sure they can sell you out, but new competition which is privacy focused should end that.
- chii 9y ago> Problem is it's dead. and if it's so good, why is sparc dead?
- detaro 9y agoBecause most people don't buy their CPUs for openness, they buy them for price, performance and software support. As far as I know, Fujitsu still sells it with high-end servers (attempting to take on IBM POWER), and it's still floating around in embedded designs, but it's a niche choice, with the associated downsides.
- cjsuk 9y agoYes. Software support was good, but price and performance were not. That and Oracle.
- the_mitsuhiko 9y agoBig endian, not enough suppliers, Oracle, too expensive, not enough market share and much more
- sverige 9y agoThey are not making more, but reasonably priced used sparc64 servers are still reasonably easy to find. OpenBSD runs well on most models.
- sfifs 9y agowasn't Java supposed to be precisely that?
- cjsuk 9y agoYes I suppose it was.