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The January rumours were true and on Friday Oracle laid off the core talent from the Solaris and SPARC teams, in effect finally killing what they had left of Sun Microsystems. When Oracle aquired Sun, there were a lot of valuable assets, each of which, except VirtualBox, has been squandered and abandoned. Simon Phipps enumerates the main ones and what happened to them.
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Everyone hates me because I'm paranoid.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday September 06 2017, @10:13AM
Huh? Atom is x86, which is about as CISC as they come. ARM is RISC, but is a much richer RISC ISA than SPARC (for example, it has a modern set of SIMD instructions, rich addressing modes and things like bitfield insert / extract as single instructions). ARMv8 is pretty close to the sweet spot in terms of making instructions as complex as they can be without requiring microcode (which hurts power consumption because it means a complex decoder needs to be powered all of the time). SPARC is much closer to a classic RISC design (very close to RISC II) and hasn't been updated much since the '80s. It's too simple to make good use of silicon (lots of things are two or more SPARC instructions that can be done easily in a single modern pipeline) and it doesn't map easily from the back end of a modern compiler.
sudo mod me up