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SPARC already has an ecosystem thanks to Sun/Oracle. Gaisler did open implementation, Leon3. Sun/Oracle did T1 and T2. Registration to say it was SPARC compatib

SPARC already has an ecosystem thanks to Sun/Oracle. Gaisler did open implementation, Leon3. Sun/Oracle did T1 and T2. Registration to say it was SPARC compatible was only $99 when I looked at it years ago. My only question was why the heck isn't someone cranking them out for security or FOSS markets? Didn't get a chance to find out. Now we have RISC-V chips being developed with lots of companies getting behind it. Still easier to get ahold of SPARC chips, though. I'll also add that quite a few projects in academia used SPARC. OpenPiton being one that might justify using SPARC over RISC-V, esp if NUMA machine. :) http://parallel.princeton.edu/piton/# http://parallel.princeton.edu/piton/#

HeWhoLurksLate 8y ago
RISC-V is getting quite the ecosystem, though. IIRC, an effort made by Western Digital has made it possible to cross-compile stuff for RISC-V. Debian works just fine on RISC-V silicon. Right now the big thing seems to be getting real-time, hardware-supported JavaScript processing working so that the modern web works on it well.
- tambourine_man 8y ago
  >real-time, hardware-supported JavaScript processing You mean JIT, right? The benefits of being interpreted falls flat when, in practice, everyone needs to run a highly tuned just in time compiler.
  - HeWhoLurksLate 8y ago
    Yes, that. Words were failing me, as was Google.
- tyingq 8y ago
  The cross compiler looks like it was mostly contributions from SiFive, not WD. WD uses it, and references it.