Sun Cancels UltraSPARC IIIi+

Doctor Memory writes "El Reg is reporting that Sun has finally come clean and admitted that they have killed the UltraSPARC IIIi+ chip. According to John Fowler, Sun's server chief, 'We canceled it last fiscal year to focus on the ramp (up) of UltraSPARC IV+, Niagara and Niagara 2.' Sun has had great success with its new Niagara line, and with it's line of AMD-based systems."

Comments

Ho Hum

[gentimjs]

Is anyone surprised? USIV and T1 are by far Suns big cash cows. While I'm typing this at an USIIIi powered workstation, and would love a simple upgrade, I cant say that this upsets me in the least. I'd far rather Sun's R&D go into thier higher-end stuff than entry-level stuff, since it will push the current "high end" crap down to the level that us mere mortals will be able to get it! :-D

Re:Questionable is spelled "sun4m" by Sun.

[sethstorm]

Sun has done some questionable things, but those aren't it.
Their handling of sun4m and hardware thereof in not-so OpenSolaris 10 seems to be a bit (more?) questionable given that there was a workable, buildable version of it- and I doubt svn goes back 3-4+ years to s10_22. It'd at least be better to have them put it back in, along with all the hardware eol'ed along the way(and fully documented). Then Sun can just close the book on that platform for good once there is something of a "reference build" that works as well as the rest (versus something that was crippled out of spite - dtrace is forgiven here, and I'd think you could dig up s10_22, and enough of else was dropped to get about any sun4m class system running, bmc).

Anything much earlier than sun4c/d/m seems to not have much of an installbase, or mass amounts of documentation missing on critical points of hardware(console, network, storage). Ironic that for now that Sun *doesnt* want you to have your hardware and software match, even when there is a perfect opportunity to do it.