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Sun & Fujitsu Team On SPARC Chips & System
An anonymous reader writes "Sun and Fujitsu just announced a 20-year partnership to jointly develop SPARC based technology and systems. It looks like the long-predicted partnership that was hinted at earlier has finally come to pass in a much more comprehensive manner than I've heard anyone predict, i.e. not just chips, but a unified range of systems. My guess: Sun drops Ultrasparc III to provide the Throughput computing chips for the low end / web / network stuff, and takes up the Fujitsu provided SPARC64 chips for the high end and workstation market. Will this spark a new RISC renaissance for Sun and Fujitsu? Or is it a last gasp before Opteron / PowerPC / Itanium crush them? I for one will be interested to see what systems and processors come out of this. This could really revitalize the SPARC system market, especially if Sun's work on Throughput computing proves out."
> as Apple have shown its the system that matters, not the processor.
Yes, but remember, Apple was hurting for quite some time after Motorola stopped working on high end PPC chips. The stagnant G4 hurt Apple - I use encoding software that had started out on Macs but moved the focus of its development to Windows after the the G4 lost steam. The apple version still exists and is supported, but lacks some of the features of the Windows version. And while I've not had a chance to run it on a G5, a dual Athlon MP utterly spanks a dual G4.
The G5 certainly helps, but it still leaves Apple at the mercy of an outside supplier.