Are there any recent SPARC laptops?

[jkl]

As Oracle is obviously still developing SPARCs, I wonder if there are any current manufacturers of SPARC-based laptops. I just feel like I could want one for playing with it.

[Oko]

No! The only manufacturer of sparc based laptops was Cuipertino based Tedpole which went out of business 2013

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadpole_Computer

They last spark based laptop has SMRP of close to $3000 and was working so hot that there was no way you could keep it on the lap.

You are beating a dead horse. The only current architectures are amd64, mips64 and arm32/64.

[jkl]

How is MIPS64 (latest release: v6, 2014) more "current" than SPARC (latest release: Sonoma, 2016)?

The "amd64" CISC architecture is technically inferior to RISC, it always was. I agree with you that arm64 is a quite common architecture, but, being optimized for "power-saving", I would never use an ARM for real work. Sorry, but I don't want my real machine to work like my smartphone.

[Oko]

Originally Posted by jkl

How is MIPS64 (latest release: v6, 2014) more "current" than SPARC (latest release: Sonoma, 2016)?

The "amd64" CISC architecture is technically inferior to RISC, it always was. I agree with you that arm64 is a quite common architecture, but, being optimized for "power-saving", I would never use an ARM for real work. Sorry, but I don't want my real machine to work like my smartphone.

RISC technically is superior to CISC and will dominate the world! I heard somebody else saying that before. His name is Andrew Tanenbaum. He said that in early 90s and it turns out that in practical terms he was wrong. Cheap Inter crap wiped out all those nice Alpha, SGI, and Sparc64 machines I liked so much.

We are not talking about the same kind mips64. Mips64 is very common networking hardware. OpenBSD has rudimentary support for such hardware via Octeon port. Mips64 on the workstations is dead. I didn't say arm64 is usable for anything yet. I am just saying that it is alive architecture and will flourish sooner or later. OpenBSD has no support yet for such hardware but there are few guys who are porting it over from Bitrig. amd64 is more or less what people who use "real" computers use these days. Sparc64 is dead. You will have to point a gun to Oracle sales rep before they offer you sparc64 hardware. Before Oracle acquisition Sun hold 85% of market share for such hardware. Fujitsu had 15%. I would be curious about the prices for these

http://www.fujitsu.com/global/produc...rise/products/


I can get for about 12K here in good old U.S. of A. 4x16 Core Intel machine with 1.5 TB of ECC RAM. In any case even hard core OpenBSD hackers from what I can tell don't hack anymore on sparc64. In the past sparc64 was the platform where OpenBSD development was largely taking the place.

[jkl]

According to the current discussion about dropping VAX support, Theo stated that SPARC64 is actively supported and will remain so for the foreseeable future, unlike SPARC "32" which, to which I agree, is deprecated hardware.

I never cared about "what people use"; if I did, I probably would never have used anything but Windows on my workstation machines. (Sorry - I'm not old enough for actively having lived through the 80s/early 90s when the multitude of good operating systems was actually fascinating.) I just thought a RISC machine would make sense on a desktop and, as ARM is not made for real work, there must be a usable workstation RISC chip and I thought SPARC would be the most mature one...?

Why does Oracle continue to develop new SPARCs then?

[e1-531g]

Originally Posted by jkl

I agree with you that arm64 is a quite common architecture, but, being optimized for "power-saving", I would never use an ARM for real work.

If you mean by arm64 just instruction set, it is just instruction set. There are various electronics implementations of it done by a few companies. For example Cavium's processor is being designed for (micro)servers. Nvidia have quite powerful cores developed by itself.
Probably ARM ecosystem's patent portfolio is power-saving focused, but it does not mean that ARM will always be slower.
You should also note that ARMv8/AArch64 is quite young.
Gnu/Linux distributions have partial from about late 2014/early 2015. Partial.
FreeBSD is going to have support in 11 release, but heavily tested against only one processor family - Cavium.
***
There are also IBM Power v8 processors. Phoronix pointed out in February, that there will be Talos Secure Workstation launched.

[Oko]

Originally Posted by jkl

According to the current discussion about dropping VAX support, Theo stated that SPARC64 is actively supported and will remain so for the foreseeable future, unlike SPARC "32" which, to which I agree, is deprecated hardware.

I never cared about "what people use"; if I did, I probably would never have used anything but Windows on my workstation machines. (Sorry - I'm not old enough for actively having lived through the 80s/early 90s when the multitude of good operating systems was actually fascinating.) I just thought a RISC machine would make sense on a desktop and, as ARM is not made for real work, there must be a usable workstation RISC chip and I thought SPARC would be the most mature one...?

Why does Oracle continue to develop new SPARCs then?

sparc64 hardware is relatively easy to find and I am sure sparc64 port is not going anywhere in the near future. The ports likely to follow VAX are armish, socppc, sparc (this is old 32-bit Sun's sparc from mid 80s).

Is Oracle actively releasing documentation for their latest Sparc chips? If not I doubt OpenBSD sparc64 port will ever run on those new Oracle machines.

Listen I answered the question but you don't like my answer. Lets pretend that I have never answered the question and please post the dmesg when you buy that new Sparc laptop.

Best regards,
OKO

[Oko]

Originally Posted by e1-531g

There are also IBM Power v8 processors.

I am guessing that is the open hardware right? Could you post the link to the documentation?

[e1-531g]

Actually I haven't read much about Power8 powered computers. I just wanted to note this relatively new information.

[jkl]

Originally Posted by Oko

Is Oracle actively releasing documentation for their latest Sparc chips?

Seems so:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/se...15-2868130.pdf

Originally Posted by Oko

Listen I answer the question and but you don't like my answer.

Let's just say I had hoped for a "here's a link to the biggest SPARC computers online shop", not a "Just use AMD64/ARM64!". Rest assured that I do value your input though.

Originally Posted by e1-531g

You should also note that ARMv8/AArch64 is quite young.

As in: not mature enough.

Originally Posted by e1-531g

There are also IBM Power v8 processors. Phoronix pointed out in February, that there will be Talos Secure Workstation launched.

I'll investigate.
-e- Ah. (And I didn't even know that IBM is still a processor company.)

[gpatrick]

Quote:
Originally Posted by e1-531g View Post
There are also IBM Power v8 processors.
I am guessing that is the open hardware right? Could you post the link to the documentation?

http://openpowerfoundation.org/
https://www.power.org/

[e1-531g]

http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=ne...os-Crowdsupply
https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-c...re-workstation

$4,100 USD for the ATX motherboard, a heatsink, and other basic motherboard accessories [..] The CPU isn't included. POWER8 CPUs start out at $1,135 USD for the eight-core 130 Watt model or up to $3,350 USD for the 12-core 190 Watt CPU.

For $18,000 USD they are offering the complete Talos Workstation as a 12-core POWER8 CPU, 256GB of DDR3 ECC RAM, AMD FirePro or NVIDIA Tesla graphics, SAS disks for storage, and a pre-installed copy of Debian or CentOS.

12-cores means physical cores. There are 96 logical cores visible by the system.

[jkl]

Awesome. Time to save some money...

[fvgit]

Nice. Enough horsepower for the latest and greatest webbrowsers. Now where exactly did I hide my piggybank..?