Illumos to drop SPARC Support
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Illumos to drop SPARC Support
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Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support
#2A fun way to make Oracle donate a machine would be to make an official POWER port.
That's a lot of work and I don't see IBM making a machine available.
Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support
#3This is really sad. The world is heading to a duopoly x86 - arm. Alpha is dead, Mips is almost dead, PA-RISC is dead, POWER is too expensive and RISC-V is mostly nice to have.
Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support
#4This is really sad. The world is heading to a duopoly x86 - arm. Alpha is dead, Mips is almost dead, PA-RISC is dead, POWER is too expensive and RISC-V is mostly nice to have.
On the plus side, at least it looks like it will be a duopoly. For a long time it looked like x86 would eat all other architectures.
Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support
#5This is really sad. The world is heading to a duopoly x86 - arm. Alpha is dead, Mips is almost dead, PA-RISC is dead, POWER is too expensive and RISC-V is mostly nice to have.
It's mildly interesting to me that there's now really no notable big-endian systems left, yet that's still the network byte order. I wonder what the math is for the amount of global wasted CPU cycles on byte-swapping for things that would do a fair amount of that...DNS for example.
Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support
#6This is really sad. The world is heading to a duopoly x86 - arm. Alpha is dead, Mips is almost dead, PA-RISC is dead, POWER is too expensive and RISC-V is mostly nice to have.
It's mildly interesting to me that there's now really no notable big-endian systems left, yet that's still the network byte order. I wonder what the math is for the amount of global wasted CPU cycles on byte-swapping for things that would do a fair amount of that...DNS for example.
IBM mainframes are big endian, all the Linux distros support them too.
Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support
#7This is really sad. The world is heading to a duopoly x86 - arm. Alpha is dead, Mips is almost dead, PA-RISC is dead, POWER is too expensive and RISC-V is mostly nice to have.
It's mildly interesting to me that there's now really no notable big-endian systems left, yet that's still the network byte order. I wonder what the math is for the amount of global wasted CPU cycles on byte-swapping for things that would do a fair amount of that...DNS for example.
IIRC ARM devices can also be big-endian and GCC can even generate big endian 64-bit ARM code:
Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support
#8This is really sad. The world is heading to a duopoly x86 - arm. Alpha is dead, Mips is almost dead, PA-RISC is dead, POWER is too expensive and RISC-V is mostly nice to have.
x86: 8086 1978
x64: 1999
ARM: 1985 ARM64: 2011
RISC V: 2010
It took x86 about 10 years (1988) to become the most popular, and until 2005 to cause Apple to switch (another 17 years)
It took ARM about 25 years (2010) to become the most popular, and until 2020 to cause Apple to switch (another 10 years)
Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support
#9This is really sad. The world is heading to a duopoly x86 - arm. Alpha is dead, Mips is almost dead, PA-RISC is dead, POWER is too expensive and RISC-V is mostly nice to have.
Raptor Computing has some expensive-but-not-that-expensive POWER systems:
Re: Illumos to drop SPARC Support
#10This is really sad. The world is heading to a duopoly x86 - arm. Alpha is dead, Mips is almost dead, PA-RISC is dead, POWER is too expensive and RISC-V is mostly nice to have.
A lot of these architecture have some drawbacks in modern times.
Alpha’s loosey-goosey memory model makes multithreaded code on SMP systems more challenging. Linux utilizes its Alpha port as a worst-case testbed for data race conditions in its kernel.
SPARC’s register windows are anachronistic and complicate the implementation of CPUs, and I’d guess also make it more difficult to build OoOE cores (so many SPARC chips are in-order, why?)
POWER isn’t so bad though. It’s open enough where you could build your own lower-cost core if you wanted. There’s nothing intrinsic to the ISA that would mandate an expensive chip other than volume constraints.
PA-RISC put up some great numbers back in the day but between the Compaq acquisition (bringing with it Alpha) and Itanium it was chronically under-resourced. They had a great core in the early 90s and basically just incrementally tweaked it until its death.