On 04/09/17 13:45, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
On 09/04/2017 03:11 PM, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:I'd suggest that excessively-optimistic claims when there's a strong indicationthat Oracle is sending Labor Day turkeys to its staff aren't helpful.I don't think this is excessively-optimistic. From what I have learned, the staff that was let go was all in the Solaris department while we here are concerned about Linux on SPARC. So I am not worried unless there comes an official statementwhich confirms that all SPARC development has been stopped.
Like yourself, I tend to be somewhat old-fashioned about this sort of thing. Unfortunately, we live in an era when big companies do their best to pull the wool over their shareholders' eyes, not to mention their staff and customers.
And from what I have seen officially, it does not look like SPARC has been canned,see for example this talk [1]:"General Session: SPARC Systems Update – Advancing the Software in Silicon Revolution"
And also "Virtual SPARC on x86: Your Legacy Solaris Apps Survive on an x86 SPARC Emulator" with most of the remainder being about Oracle's "cloud" where customers don't have to worry about minor details like what the hardware is.
And I'd remind you that this is not the first time that an entire architecture's been retired: Unisys dropped the proprietary "Large System" hardware they inherited from Burroughs a few years ago, in favour of running it on x86 using an emulator.
-- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]