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I’d love for someone more informed to provide some insider detail, but by appearances Oracle really, really tried to make SPARC a differentiator for them after
by twoodfin 2y ago
I’d love for someone more informed to provide some insider detail, but by appearances Oracle really, really tried to make SPARC a differentiator for them after the Sun acquisition.
They were shipping new systems (M8) based on a consistent in-house evolution of SPARC almost 8 years after the acquisition, a veritable eternity in tech time.
Eventually the market just said, no, we want x64 and a path to Cloud.
One wonders if they’d kept at it for a few more years whether they’d have needed to bid for Altera at all, given the gaps opened up by Intel’s struggles.
- pjmlp 2y agoWhich is a pity, given that Solaris SPARC has been doing hardware memory tagging in production for a decade now.
- lambda_foo 2y agoEven if Oracle tried, SPARC performance was terrible and their value for money was too. We benchmarked a finance system (Transaction Processing) where we needed 3x the SPARC hardware to keep up with Intel/Linux. Once they bought Sun I couldn't see any future where they made it work with keeping SPARC alive. Best case was keeping Solaris on x86 since that had genuinely better features (Zones and DTrace in particular).