Recent content by graphic7

My experience with purchasing a laptop off of eBay was extremely positive. I was able to get a Tadpole SPARCbook 6500 /w 4GB of memory, 650MHz UltraSPARC-IIe processor, and 2x60GB IDE disks for about 1/25th of its retail price.

The IBM pSeries POWER5 and POWER6 gear are essentially vector machines. Rather than throwing a vector unit on each processor, multiple processors in the system act as the vector unit. One can setup calculations in such away on the POWER5 and POWER6 that when a calculation is completed in foo set...

I'm sure Intel wasn't happy about this, but then again, not many vendors have multi-cored CPUs that are built for floating-point calculations. At the time Microsoft made their decision to go with the PowerPC, there was the UltraSPARC-T1, which has a shared FPU unit across all of its 8 cores...

You shouldn't have any problem running Solaris 10 or Nevada in VMware; however, I can't guarantee what level of performance you'll receive. As for your current server overheating, I'd make sure you have your fans placed properly throughout the chassis. I have a peecee that tends to run anywhere...

I'm currently using mine as a Sun Ray server (Sun Rays are thin clients sold by Sun which are solid-state devices that have no moving parts -- not even a fan) and an Oracle development server (most of the work I do on the side involves DBA and PL/SQL development). It also serves as my build...

Genesi has some very affordable (http://www.genesippc.com/) PowerPC systems. Most new SPARC systems aren't exactly affordable (the new Sun Ultra 25 is the low-end SPARC workstation sold by Sun and it starts at ~ $2,500); however, many that are in the 7- to -10-year-old range can be had for...

Absolutely; however, alternative, open architectures need to be advocated. This was an excellent opportunity, because, apparently a lot of the people that voted in this thread aren't aware there are alternatives to x86.

x86 is the name of the architecture that Intel created and sells. AMD is just another x86 vendor, and the only reason they're an x86 vendor is they constantly reverse-engineered x86 CPUs Intel produced throughout the 80s and 90s, often doing clean-room implementations. This is why I say x86 is...

You clearly said they were companies. Yes, Sun is a major AMD64 vendor, nowadays, but they're also just another vendor of an implementation of SPARCv8/SPARCv9.

:smile: SPARC and PowerPC are not companies. They are architectures, manufactured by a wide-range of companies, because they're open architectures. Sun and Fujitsu have their own SPARCv9 implementations. And many companies in the early 90s had SPARCv8 implementations, like Sun, Fujitsu, Texas...

You might try reading the Wikipedia arcticles of each respective architecture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerpc http://www.opensparc.net/ houses a completely open Verilog implementation of one of Sun's SPARCv9-compliant processors, the UltraSPARC-T1...

So why do you disagree that x86 is a highly proprietary architecture?

No, I'm not joking. Its always been the case that to fabricate x86-compatible CPUs, you must seek an 'agreement' with Intel. Very few companies have this agreement, and one of them is AMD. The majority of other architectures out there, nowadays, do not require this, like SPARC and PowerPC, which...

Perhaps, you should be more informed and read the Wikipedia article on AMD, specifically, the bit about 'litigation with Intel'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amd More likely re: (1) is that's all you've ever heard of.

Why only AMD and Intel? They're both only x86 vendors. There are many other processor manufacturers out there that produce far more interesting and open processors, such as PowerPC and SPARC. x86 is without a doubt one of the most proprietary architecture. AMD has been sued a number of times by...