SPARC Status (Was Re: Secondary Architecture Status?)

[Josh Boyer]

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 01:11:25PM -0500, Adam Miller wrote:
>I completely agree with everything posted by Spot and I (nor I assume
>anyone) am aware of what Oracle's game plan is but they have announced
>that they are planning to put more money into SPARC.
>
>http://www.osnews.com/story/21458/Oracle_To_Invest_in_SPARC_Wants_to_Be_Like_Apple_Cisco
>
>This would be nice because we could (hopefully) see some SPARC
>workstations come back into play allowing people to become interested
>in and contribute to the project once more. Don't know that it would
>give the architecture enough of a user base to make it an applicable
>architecture again, but its at least something I think should be
>watched as time goes on.

I very much doubt new SPARC workstations will happen.  For a multitude
of reasons, but primarily:

1) They will not be price competitive with their x86 counterparts
2) They will not have feature parity with their x86 counterparts because
   of 1.
3) The market for a non-x86 workstation is significantly tiny (and SPARC
   isn't exactly netbook friendly, so not really targetable there like
   ARM might be).


I would really like to see a proliferation of secondary arches in
Fedora, but I don't think 'workstation' is a viable usage model for
them to get started.  Most will have to focus on the type of hardware
that actually sells for that arch, and yes I realize that can be at
odds with some of the directions Fedora is going.

josh