Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 27th Aug 2008 22:13 UTC, submitted by rom508
OSNews reader rom508 sent us a note that apparently, Sun has ceased selling all of its UltraSPARC-based workstations, with only their x86 workstation offerings remaining. The Ultra 25 and Ultra 45 workstations, both UltraSPARC-based, are still listed on Sun's website, but are marked as 'end-of-life', with the notice that they are "superceded by the next generation Sun Ultra 24 Workstation [x86]". One must wonder if this means the end of Sun's UltraSPARC workstation line. As a proud owner of an indestructible Ultra 5, I must say, that would be rather sad.
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Member since:
2007-04-20
Which hardware parts are failing for you that you have to replace them? I have Ultra 10 which is 10 years old now and it's still running without any problems. The only part that failed for me was NVRAM chip, because it has embedded battery, which lasts for about 10 years. When the machine could not keep time correctly and then stopped booting, all I had to do was to buy a brand new NVRAM chip (don't get second hand on ebay, they too might have dying batteries) and replace it on the mainboard and reprogram it. Reprogramming NVRAM is pretty simple once you get the correct instructions.
I agree Ultra 5/10 are cheap and slow, but they still do the job. I use Ultra 10 as my main desktop system for email, web browsing and playing music. These machines are perfect for software developers, because they're small, reliable and have a decent ISA (Instruction Set Architecture). There should be more developers using SPARC hardware, because there is too much software that crashes with 'Bus error' as soon as you run it (yes Trolltech and KDE4 teams, you're some of them).
Well, at least Sun's new multicore processors are open, maybe somebody will develop a new workstation or even a mobile platform for them. I'd love to have a decent SPARC notebook. I think if Sun want to see SPARC in the future and have people developing software for their platform, they should encourage developers to use their platform. Just produce something half decent and not too expensive, like cheap SPARC notebooks and workstations and hardware documentation. Most people don't need 3GHz processors, I'm pretty happy with 440MHz UltraSPARCIIi, it doesn't take long to compile whatever assembly or C code I develop. It's the architecture that matters, I think SPARC is much nicer than x86.