Saturday 6 April 2013

Could a new Sparc chip ignite mobile Sparc laptop interest?

It was announce in January 2013 that Oracle and Fujitsu had extended their development partnership of Sparc technology with a new range of 'Athena' Sparc T5 processors for entry and mid range servers, along with Sparc M5 processors. These chips used for high end computing continues a roadmap set out by Sun Microsystems in Sparc technology. Following the takeover of Sun Microsystems the roadmap for Sparc technology remained uncertain until this announcement.

However the announcement has created a refocused interest in mobile technology for the sparc technology. Sun Micro systems sold rebranded laptops until 2005 when the company was purchased by Oracle. Specialist manufacturer Tadpole was acquired by General Dynamics who consolidated the range to specialist uses such as military field systems discontinuing large scale manufacture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadpole_Computer. Further  interest continued in Sparc by Accutech Ultrasystems who launched a range of Sun Ray end user notebooks based on SPARC / Solaris environments.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1

It remains to be seen if progression of leaner more effective notebook manufacturing techniques will once again open the business case for manufacture of Sparc based professional notebooks at a competitive point.

P.S. OiOS (Openindiana) according to Fijitsu has not yet been officially certified to run these chips for further information about support please visit kernel development project http://wiki.illumos.org