Oracle Said To Be Baking A Low-Cost SPARC Chip

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Oracle Said To Be Baking A Low-Cost SPARC Chip

While Debian just dropped support for SPARC and many are writing off SPARC as dead under Oracle with their offering of x86 servers, a new report out today suggests otherwise. It's being reported that Oracle plans to introduce "Sonoma" as a low-cost SPARC processor...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Oracle-Low-Cost-SPARC

[cb88]

Sign me up! It would be super cool if we could get mesa and open source graphics drivers working well on there as well... I think most of the pieces are in place for that to happen but it just isn't well tested at all.

[thunderbird32]

Yeah, this is actually really exciting. It'll be good to get some low-cost SPARC hardware to compete with IBM's OpenPOWER hardware (even if Tyan is the only company offering it at current).

[budric]

Can someone clue me in why this is exciting? Just for competition sake or are there some technical advantages?

[ElectricPrism]

Was the last major player to use SPARC OSX before the x86 switch? Or was it Sun Microsystems with their servers.

I find it hilarious that the Oracle team wasn't more creative - naming it "Sonoma" comes off as Lazy as that's the County directly next to Marin where Oracle is located.

I don't care what kind of architecture it is as long as it kicks ass.

[duby229]

Was the last major player to use SPARC OSX before the x86 switch? Or was it Sun Microsystems with their servers.

I find it hilarious that the Oracle team wasn't more creative - naming it "Sonoma" comes off as Lazy as that's the County directly next to Marin where Oracle is located.

I don't care what kind of architecture it is as long as it kicks ass.

OSX was on PPC before the Intel switch. And it was Sun Micro with Solaris on SPARC. Although HP also has an HPUX port for SPARC as well.

[Luke_Wolf]

Was the last major player to use SPARC OSX before the x86 switch?

No, Apple used PowerPC before switching over to x86.

[Luke_Wolf]

Can someone clue me in why this is exciting? Just for competition sake or are there some technical advantages?

SPARC is an open hardware platform is one of the bigger things, but it's a chip that's primarily targeted at UNIX workstations and servers. However it's totally irrelevant to the general consumer market for the time being.

[ruthan]

Haha, Oracle just throw some money and from nothing would reveal intel Xeon competitor.. this architecture is dead from price/ performance point of view, unless Oracle would subsidize HW - and its not gonna happen, because Oracle was always very greedy company.
Only real x86 competition is now ARM, Sparc, Power and MIPS are dead.

[SystemCrasher]

SPARC-based servers to compete with Intel's Xeon processors.

I guess they would rather compete with Itanium instead (dubbed as [T]itanic by some IT guys around). What OS you expect to use? Debian who just dropped sparc support? Oh, really? Oracle's unbreakable stuff? They only care about running own DB, so it would lack other software in repos. Lack of software is a major issue even for RedHat, and one really do not have to expect much from ripoff of RH Linux aka "unbreakable Linux". Oracle has got really poor record of upstream cooperaion and managing opernsource projects. And CPU where you have no software to run is a rather pointless thing, actually.