SPARC business may have potential buyers. Several companies from China are interested in processor and high performance server business. The biggest stopper here is government regulation on high performance computing. They have to work around on this if possible.
Just my two cents.
Chinese HW companies have been licensing ARM64 and manufacture mobile processors for smartphones for years. Why would they want to waste money on SPARC?
Maybe Oracle should ditch Sparc and go ARM64
There was a working port of Solaris to ARM in the OpenSolaris days. The idea was that it would become Solaris on ARM64. Back then the ARM64 spec wasn't fully finalized and there were no ARM64 chips to speak of anyway.
The SPARC die-hards inside Sun were not happy about the ARM port. Toxic politics happened. In the alternate SPARC fanbois live in, the universe revolves around SPARC.
The Solaris ARM port was killed by LE and SC immediately after the Sun acquisition.
Maybe Oracle should ditch Sparc and go ARM64, if there is any interest from the suits to hang on hardware.
It is not just sparc, sparc design is open right?
Yes, SPARC design is open. Anyone can license it. Buying a SPARC license is $50 US Dollars.
If China had any interest in SPARC they could afford the cost of the $50 SPARC license. But they didn't.
If anyone thinks that China isn't able to build their own supercomputers based on their own technology, think again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunway_TaihuLight
That is the world's current #1 supercomputer. The chip architecture is homegrown and home cooked in China, and evidently a state secret. Some people speculate it's based on DEC Alpha, some others that it's based on ARM64, some other others that it's MIPS.
The world's #2 supercomputer is the Tianhe-2 and is based on Intel Xeons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianhe-2
Sorry SPARC fanbois, SPARC ain't where supercomputing is at. Get over it.
Oh so u're indeed the only one walking the earth. Wait, which earth?
China may (see I'm but indicating a remote possibility here) still be interested in at least acquiring some of sparc's IP
Delusional to the very end. That has been the core competency of the SPARC and Solaris organizations for the past 15+ years.
You can't even type a Google search.
OK this is interesting. Aside from a few articles alluding to a little-known chip producer 'phytium', I don't see anything like a government/authority published white paper or anything detailing China's strategy on HPC development and such. Granted Sparc is on its way out and could be eliminated any day in business sense, but historically as a country without any HPC platform provider for a long time, China may (see I'm but indicating a remote possibility here) still be interested in at least acquiring some of sparc's IP and see what they can do with it.
Don't sound like you're the only one dwelling this planet. That doesn't add any value, not even 1 cent, to your argument. OK?
Is there a news link or something that confirms China has decided on ARM64 for its HPC platforms?
Have you heard of Google?
Anyway, even if that's the case, adding sparc to its pool of HPC alternatives doesn't seem like a bad idea.
Yeah. You go ahead and preach SPARC chip diversity in China. Maybe they can start a Chinese affirmative action program for dead RISC architectures. Good luck with that.
Is there a news link or something that confirms China has decided on ARM64 for its HPC platforms? Anyway, even if that's the case, adding sparc to its pool of HPC alternatives doesn't seem like a bad idea. The real thing is 'national security', something up to the senate and house to debate on.
Several companies from China are interested in processor and high performance server business
The Chinese already have an architecture for HPC: ARM64, not SPARC.
Nobody's interested in SPARC anymore, not even Fujitsu. Fujitsu switched to ARM64 for their HPC architecture.
North korea's little kim will be very interested to buy it to develop world's fastest & high performance nukes. Hope trump approves it!!