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Oracle To Debut Low-Cost SPARC Chip Next Month
jfruh writes: Of the many things Oracle acquired when it absorbed Sun, the SPARC processors have not exactly been making headlines. But that may change next month when the company debuts a new, lower-cost chip that will compete with Intel's Xeon. "Debut," in this case, means only an introduction, though -- not a marketplace debut. From the article:
[T]he Sparc M7 will have technologies for encryption acceleration and memory protection built into the chip. It will also include coprocessors to accelerate database performance.
"The idea of Sonoma is to take exactly those same technologies and bring them down to very low cost points, so that people can use them in cloud computing and for smaller applications, and even for smaller companies who need a lower entry point," [Oracle head of systems John] Fowler said. ... [Fowler] didn’t talk about prices or say how much cheaper the new Sparc systems will be, and it could potentially be years before Sonoma comes to market—Oracle isn’t yet saying. Its engineers are due to discuss Sonoma at the Hot Chips conference in Silicon Valley at the end of the month, so we might learn more then.
It's dead Jim.
That's the debian verdict. Oracle may have other ideas, but if drinking that koolaid, caution is advised.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
It highlights an important problem: the Debian project has been making one truly bad decision after another recently.
We all know about Debian's systemd disaster. It was an absolutely stupid move that seriously divided the Debian community, and forced many of its best users over to the BSDs and other OSes.
SPARC support was killed because there where no developers to maintain it. Debian doesn't have fat support contracts that enables the project to hire developers to support legacy architectures. So if a software project/package/architecture isn't supported by developers so that bugs get fixed, it will be killed off.
systemd was widely welcomed by almost all Debian developers and the vast majority of Debian end-users. There was a lot of noise of the Debian mailing lists when the decision was made, but it turned out that the tiny minority of systemd-opponents couldn't even muster 5 Debian Developers to sponsor a GR to overturn that decision.
They also pretty much killed Debian GNU/kFreeBSD near the end of last year.
Again, look at the Debian mailing list. There where practically zero Debian GNU/kFreeBSD developers active, meaning that bugs didn't get fixed, even release blocker bugs. Even Debian GNU/Hurd was a vibrating developer hub compared to kFreeBSD and probably had many more end users too.
If you want something in the open source world, you will have to contribute towards it, either by code, bug reports, translations/documentation or money. Both the SPARC architecture and kFreeBSD failed to receive enough of such support to survive.
Notice that Debian will continue to support SPARC on existing pre-Jessie SPARC releases, just not on future ones.