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0 pointsrbanffy8y ago0 comments

SPARC died the moment every developer had a good enough x86 desktop running a Unix flavor (and Sun decided it'd be happy not to build desktops anymore). At that point, we cease to imagine deploying our stuff in SPARC. We test on x86 and make it run well on x86 before it gets compiled for SPARC.

At that point, unless the SPARC hardware has some definitive cost/performance advantage, we'll buy x86. SPARC is for legacy.

Same applies to POWER, BTW. How many new apps have you seen in the past 10 years that were designed for POWER?

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emmelaich8y ago· 1 in thread

What accelerated it even further was when Linux went 64 bit and hardware improved to the point where it was a suitable replacement for big iron Solaris (the SunFire 6900 for example). That was around 2005 from memory.

And the 6900's features with regard to HA in the field fell well short of advertised.

Now you can get a Linux box with 4Tb of RAM so no-one should buy Solaris over Linux.

rbanffyOP8y ago

Now you can get a 24TB, 192-core beast that fits within 7U rack. That same chassis will probably go way beyond that with newer Scalable Xeons.

And you could cram even more x86 cores with up to five Xeon Phi coprocessor cards, while Intel's supplies last.

https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/7U/7088/SYS-7088B...

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