Debian Drops SPARC Platform Support 152
jones_supa writes: SPARC isn't exactly a highly-used architecture anymore, so the Debian operating system is dropping support for the platform, according to Joerg Jaspert last week in the "debian-sparc" mailing list. He noted that this does not block a later comeback as "sparc64." Following that announcement, a new post today tells us that SPARC support was just removed from the unstable, experimental and jessie-updates channels.
Sad Day (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the first version of Debian I'd ever used was Hamm on an old Sparcstation IPC.
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Debian hamm sucked quite a bit less than SunOS
We had a couple of those. You should have tried NetBSD. For a very long time, Linux had particularly bad handling of the SPARC TLB and NetBSD was faster to the extent that it was noticeable by the user in the GUI.
apart from the terrible quality of the CG3 driver in Xfree, which would lock the entire machine up solid after about 30 minutes of use
When was these? Even after they stopped being useful as stand-alone machines, we used them as dumb X servers and easily had a few weeks of XFree86 uptime.
Yeah, Debian is sooo popular on Intel.... (Score:2, Insightful)
This decision makes sense, since Debian is so dominant on Intel boxes that they can't afford resources to support SPARC - even though the port already exists and it's simply a matter of migrating the same incremental changes that are there on Lintel to SPARC.
So much for the claim Linux fans make of the OS being 'everywhere' - here is a UNIX only CPU: no version of Windows ever ran on it, only UNIX-like OSs, such as SunOS, Solaris, Linux and *BSD.
Re:Yeah, Debian is sooo popular on Intel.... (Score:4, Interesting)
If it's so easy, why don't you take over the port and show us how it's done? Debian has been very up front for years now that the sparc port was on its way out due to lack of interest; if anyone really cared, they would have stepped up to maintain it. The problem here isn't that it's impossible, or even a theoretical challenge, the problem is that the sparc hardware in general isn't really all that great and there isn't really a compelling reason to use it when people are literally throwing out higher-spec'd x86 gear. Only on the highest end is the sparc line potentially interesting, and nobody spends that much money to run a research project as an OS; by the time the hardware is available to hobbyist developers it's obsolete--and again, why bother plugging in a really power-hungry system and spend years developing for a platform that, by the time it's usable, will be outperformed by tomorrow's junk?
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Then it was slink. It's been 16 years, details can get a bit fuzzy.
ran debian on sparc for over 10 years (Score:4, Interesting)
I had a Sun Netra T1 200 for a bit over 10 years that ran Debian on Sparc. The hardware was reliable, the Debian as an OS worked well enough, less of a headache than Solaris IMHO. Occasionally had some weird kernel related quirks, but I generally just kept it tracking Debian sid.
I think it was just a matter of time that the Debian sparc port went away, the surplus of old sparc boxes has gone away more than anything. I'm not sure anyone used Debian on sparc for anything serious(read business use), though.
Re:ran debian on sparc for over 10 years (Score:4, Interesting)
Used it in comcast to make close to $1,000,000 a day gathering data from the old ad insertion boxes.
Solaris was a major PITA to deal with so I installed debian and simply rewrote the data harvester in C and it ran that way for 11 years. 4 of which were without any maintenance at all as I had left the company. and 4 years later I started getting notifications of script failures to a private email address I had that interfaced with my MSN watch. (Yes that long ago)
The funny part is someone recently fired that box back up as last month I had an email that it successfully rebooted and started the cron job but could not find the servers it was trying to harvest data from.
Re:ran debian on sparc for over 10 years (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure anyone used Debian on sparc for anything serious(read business use), though.
Let's be honest......the day the value of open source software is determined by its "business use," is the day the open source community is dead.
Open Source in business usage (Score:2)
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Successful projects are ones where the people who want to use it want to use it enough to fund development.
I'm going to call you a moron right here because you only think of success in terms of monetary value and popularity. Success is not measured by money alone.
A successful project is one that produces great code, one that makes its creator happy.
Mod reversal (Score:3, Informative)
Posting to cancel a 'Troll' mod that I posted to the wrong comment by mistake. And may the AC who posted shit about gay black people, die very slowly in a fire
.
Re:Mod reversal (Score:4, Informative)
It's GNAA, arguably been trolling Slashdot as long as SPARC has been around.
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Re:Mod reversal (Score:4, Funny)
A Shame (Score:3)
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My gods. Dude, those things were slow on the very day they CAME OUT.
I don't know why Sun even made the SparcClassic. They were absolute garbage, then you look at how expensive they were and it's even more mind blowing.
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My gods. Dude, those things were slow on the very day they CAME OUT.
I don't know why Sun even made the SparcClassic. They were absolute garbage, then you look at how expensive they were and it's even more mind blowing.
It was the low cost SPARCstation LX, which itself was not a screamer, but fast enough.
You have to remember the PCs of the time were mostly i386. This was pre-Pentium, and i486s were still very expensive. All PCs were ISA bus (16-bit at perhaps 20MHz) versus the 32-bit 25MHz SBUS serving the SPARCstations of the time, and it can be seen that anything beyond the CPU was much faster on any SPARCstation. And even CPU wise, SPARC had the legs of even the highest end i486s of the time, especially on FPU performan
Wow, end of an era. (Score:5, Interesting)
For more than just a couple of us here, I suspect, there was a time when "Sparc," "UNIX," "graphics," "Internet," and "science" were all nearly synonymous terms.
Simpler times. Boy did that hardware last and last and last in comparison to the hardware of today.
Well, I suppose it can finally no longer be said that the Sparcstation 10 I keep here just for old times' sake can still run "current Linux distributions." But it's still fun to pull it out for people, show them hundreds of megabytes of RAM, 1152x900 24-bit graphics, gigabytes of storage, multiple ethernet channels, and multiple processors, running Firefox happily, and tell them it dates to 1992, when high-end PCs were shipping with mayyybe 16-32GB RAM, a single 486 processor, 640x480x16 graphics, a few dozen megabytes of storage, and no networking.
It helps people to get a handle on how it was possible to develop the internet and do so much of the science that came out of that period—and why even though I don't know every latest hot language, the late '80s/early '90s computer science program that I went to (entirely UNIX-based, all homework done using the CLI, vi, and gcc, emphasis on theory, classic data structures, and variously networked/parallelized environments, with labs of Sparc and 88k hardware all on a massive campus network) seems to have prepared me for today's real-world needs better than the programs they went to, with lots of Dell boxes running Windows-based Java IDEs.
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What's amazing is how RELIABLE those things were.
We have a couple of SparcStation 5 units STILL RUNNING because a professor refuses to let them go. They have 2GB hard drives (yes TWO gigs) and 128MB of RAM. These things were outrageously expensive when they came out; I'm guessing Sun spent a lot of the extra money on overengineering the hell out of everything.
"Sir this version of Solaris is no longer supported. We can't keep running it unless we block access to it from the Internet."
"It doesn't need Interne
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Sun wasn't that. The 128 RAM wasn't cheap but the 2G HD meant they were skimping. I bet those systems were around $5-7k or so well under double what an x86 workstation would cost.
As for getting professors to give up old equipment, start metering the electricity and billing the department.
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>As for getting professors to give up old equipment, start metering the electricity and billing the department.
HAH I wish. It's funny because if this junk were x86 we would have simply virtualized it years ago. But it's SPARC and there (still) isn't a good emulator for sun4m. I think one was "getting there" but was still crashy when we tried it last.
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Have you tried: Oracle VM Server for SPARC and Oracle Solaris Zones for virtualization? Anyway Oracle and Cloud Sigma both offer Solaris in the cloud. And of course there is nothing stopping you from upgrading him to a modern Solaris box.
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There possibly IS a host of other problems besides the kernel. We still ran(run) OpenSSL/OpenSSH and Apache on those boxes so the automatic exploits that run against them may be numerous however they are typically very well sandboxed (better than some current *NIX'es) so although you won't get access to any data, they make for a great bot.
I actually have two different-era SPARC we are still supporting (the latest I believe runs Solaris 5, the first one still has an early IBM Token Ring card bridged by a ver
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Most of the things out their targeting ssh are just trying to brute force accounts, so they don't care what platform your ssh service is running on... If they are successful in getting in its highly likely that they wouldnt have a payload compatible with your system... I've setup a few such boxes as honeypots just to see what people would do with them.
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For more than just a couple of us here, I suspect, there was a time when "Sparc," "UNIX," "graphics," "Internet," and "science" were all nearly synonymous terms.
Remember the old Sun slogan: The network is the computer. [wikipedia.org]
[ Yes, I'm that old. ]
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Remember the old Sun slogan: The network is the computer. [wikipedia.org]
I thought Sun's slogan was "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." [wired.com]
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Re:Wow, end of an era. (Score:4, Insightful)
For more than just a couple of us here, I suspect, there was a time when "Sparc," "UNIX," "graphics," "Internet," and "science" were all nearly synonymous terms.
I did a six-month internship at a Fortune 500 company in 1997 where every programmer had a SPARC workstation and a row of UNIX binders on a shelf above their desk. No one actually used the binders for anything, as they were just office decorations like the plastic plants. You couldn't be a SERIOUS ENGINEER without a row of SERIOUS BINDERS above your desk.
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...and tell them it dates to 1992, when high-end PCs were shipping with mayyybe 16-32GB RAM, a single 486 processor, 640x480x16 graphics, a few dozen megabytes of storage, and no networking.
I know I wasn't buying high end at the time, but I didn't think I was I slumming it that much.
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and tell them it dates to 1992, when high-end PCs were shipping with mayyybe 16-32GB RAM, a single 486 processor, 640x480x16 graphics, a few dozen megabytes of storage, and no networking.
As much as I loved Sun hardware at that time (though I didn't get to touch anything better than a Sparcstation 2 until years later), since you explicitly mention high-end PCs, I'll have to point out that that 1992 hi-end consumer PCs (you did say high end, so I can pick the best of what's available) did have not just networking but ethernet (it was relatively common, and not just found on high end machines), could have 1024x768 with 16 or 24 bit (not color) graphics, perhaps 32 MB of memory (though that is
I was thinking of "high end" in terms of (Score:2)
what consumers had access to by walking into a retail computer dealership (there were many independent white box makers at the time) and saying "give me your best."
You're probably right about me underestimating the graphics, though it's hard to remember back that far. I'm thinking 800x600 was much more common. If you could get 1024x768, it was usually interlaced (i.e. "auto-headache") and rare if I remember correctly to be able to get with 24-bit color—S3's first 16-bit capable chips didn't come out u
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what consumers had access to by walking into a retail computer dealership ... and saying "give me your best"
Of course, by that metric, Suns weren't available at all.
SCSI was somewhat rare in a PC in 1992, yes, but not that uncommon. (Anybody remember the Adaptec AHA-1542B? It came out in 1990.)
800x600 was more common, but 1024x768 was available. I don't recall if it was all interlaced or not, but I do recall how much that interlacing sucked!
Ethernet (or token ring, that was still somewhat common) was quite common in environments where it made sense. Not in a one computer home of course, but in a business, sur
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The memory thing was basically "dial-a-pricepoint". I remember machines with a base price on the order of $5k, with $10k+ of memory (which was less than you probably have in your phone).
I'm also amused whenever one of these sparc nostalgia threads comes up, because the way I remember things the cool kids had the SGIs and DECs and the Suns were kinda the lame/cheap crap, basically the PCs of the UNIX world. They exploded during the .com bubble because you could buy those (honestly, horribly designed internal
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This was exclusively for workstations but in terms of multi processor there definitely were multi-processor 486s sold. I had a buddy with 4x486. SCO was the typical OS for these boxes. OS/2 and Linux were both working on it and would achieve it.
Also also with SCO the x86/i860 combo was popular (for an exotic workstation). The 486 while having good floating point math sucked at vector math. The i860 while good at vector math was bad at multi-tasking. There were both motherboards and compilers to take a
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No you couldn't. 16mb RAM was out the but was very expensive and many motherboards wouldn't support more than 4MB SIMMs (1 and 2MB SIMMS were still the norm for PCs). Good motherboards (in full tower cases) had at most 8 slots. So I'm going with 128MB as an upper limit.
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I was asking about the Sparcstation 10, not a PC.
Wikipedia says "The SS10 can hold a maximum of 512 MB RAM in eight slots", so that means we need 64MB modules for it, and I'm not sure they were available yet in 1992.
I've got a SS20 in my garage, and it's got 208 MB of memory -- which wasn't too bad at all, "back in the day" anyways.
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You could even get 128mb simms in 1992, they were just horrifically expensive...
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He was saying that the SS10 could handle 512 MB in 1992, at time when the best PCs were maxed out at 32 MB or so.
The SS10 takes proprietary memory, and I know there was a firmware update that allowed it to use larger (32 MB, I think) sticks at some point. Ultimately, I don't think there was any way to put 512MB into a SS10 in 1992, even if the machine did eventually support it. I think 128 MB was more likely, though even that's very good for a desktop box back then.
As for 128MB simms in 1992, I have my do
Re:Wow, end of an era. (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I suppose it can finally no longer be said that the Sparcstation 10 I keep here just for old times' sake can still run "current Linux distributions."
NetBSD and OpenBSD both run on the SparcStation 10 and they're actual UNIX operating system. http://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/s... [netbsd.org] http://www.openbsd.org/sparc.h... [openbsd.org]
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I still have 3 sparcstation-20 machines in the garage, one of which is maxed out with 512mb ram and 4 cpus... I doubt it would run firefox very smoothly tho.
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A 32 bit cpu can address 4 GB directly, but that doesn't mean it has a 4 GB memory limit.
For example, in 1995 Intel added PAE to their 32 bit Pentium Pro cpus [wikipedia.org], allowing them to access more than 4 GB of memory.
Hell, my Apple IIe had 128KB of memory, in spite of the 8 bit cpu with the 16 bit address space only being able to access 64KB of memory, through similar tricks.
And yes, 4 GB is enough for most casual users today. 2 GB even works. But give it a few more years and 4 GB will become very restrictive eve
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It's very rare to find a processor where all of these are the same. Intel tried marketing the Pentium as a 64-bit chip for a while because it had 64-bit ALU ops. Most '64-bit' processors actually have something like a 48-bit virtual and 40-bit physic
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Ordinary phones will probably pass 4G by the end of the decade.
Yes, meant MB. It's been so long since I regularly (Score:2)
used that abbreviation that it just doesn't roll off the fingers any longer.
So funny, but yeah, totally true. (Score:2)
The 386 box that I installed Linux on my first time around was 4MB (4x1MB 30-pin SIMMs). 4MB! I mean, holy god, that's tiny. It seemed sooooo big compared to the 640kb of 8-bit PCs, and yet it's basically the same order of magnitude. Not even enough to load a single JPG snapshot from a camera phone these days.
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> Not even enough to load a single JPG snapshot from a camera phone these days.
Surprisingly, this is not true!
JPEG was designed back in the 80s and 90s by a bunch of smart guys who wanted something that would work for print and screen. So, they predicted that one would reasonably want to work with images that could not be reasonably be displayed in full resolution on the hardware of the day, but might be handled line by line by a printer.
So, a JPEG decoder can downscale a JPEG on the fly. When it does th
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I didn't know that, though based on what I do know about the jpeg format, it makes a kind of sense that this would be possible. Thanks for posting this, great nugget of information!
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Yes, you can load a jpg in 4M, but you can no longer load the kernel. :)
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I used to run a SPARC box with 4MB (yes, mega) as my gateway/firewall machine when I was one of the few ISPs in the UK with (a) a live 'Internet' connection and (b) any sort of firewall.
I called the machine 'lemon' (http://www.exnet.com/NTP/ARC/ARC.html lemon.exnet.com) because it was (as a safety measure) pretty much incapable of running a compiler in that space, but it ran a mail proxy and firewall (http://www.exnet.com/ExFilter/V1.1.3-manual.html which I wrote to make sure I understoof what was going on)
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If you could find the special extended dimms for the video slots... I have a fairly mediocre CG6 in the SS20s in my garage.
systemd!! (Score:2, Funny)
It's because of systemd. Soon debian will drop linux and support only systemd.
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systemd is sooo 1h2015
This sucks (Score:3)
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Debian on an Ultra 5 (Score:2)
The standard desktop at the company I work for used to be a Sun Ultra 5, and when the company imploded I picked an Ultra 5 with a fast processor (400 MHz), put some more memory in it, took it home and put Debian on it. It worked fine. Entirely decent interactive performance, like a fast Pentium 2. Not a box for video editing or other high-CPU/bandwidth activities, but fine otherwise.
I was amused to note that it wasn't a Windows box, so it was immune to Windows attacks. It wasn't an x86 box, so it was immu
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Just a word of warning, NetBSD autobuilds too much without testing, both for the OS and for the repositories. OpenBSD you might find more stable and with packages that work; the project leader and many of the core devs are sparc and sparc64 architecture experts.
is not a "highly-used architecture anymore" (Score:2)
How retarded is that?
Most SUNs I work on are SPARC, actually all SUNs I have worked with during the last 15 years where SPARCs.
Did they run Linux? Debian? No! Obviously they ran Sun Solaris. And still do. But I guess there are plenty of shops that abuse big iron to run plenty of virtual machines.
The Debian stance might make sense (for them). Their explanation does not, though.
Re:How soon until x86 is dropped? (Score:4, Interesting)
While Cell failed as a platform, the concept itself had merit, and the concept of pairing high-performance and low-performance processors can be found in the HPC market today (like Intel's Phi or GPGPU) and in the mobile market (like ARM's big.LITTLE architecture).
Re:How soon until x86 is dropped? (Score:4, Insightful)
Dropping Sparc unfortunately makes sense. Hardware was already exotic and somewhat uncommon when it was new and still supported, and is now even more rare and given its proprietary nature, more likely to simply be permanently removed if it breaks. It's also no entry-level friendly; a kid wanting to play with Linux 'just to see' can go to the Goodwill and buy an old x86 box for $20 and friends can help make things work.
SPARC != proprietary; SPARC == open (Score:2, Interesting)
[...] and is now even more rare and given its proprietary nature [...]
I never got this: SPARC is probably the least least proprietary architecture out there.
First, anyone can license (www.sparc.org) and sell SPARC CPUs, just like you can license ARM. Try going to Intel and trying to license their latest architectures. They even use OpenBoot for their "BIOS" / firmware, which was available to anyone as IEEE 1275.
Second, you can buy SPARC servers (see above) from at least two vendors (Oracle and Fujitsu), and run Solaris (or anything else) on them.
You can even get GPL licensed
Re:SPARC != proprietary; SPARC == open (Score:4, Insightful)
Granted, SPARC isn't completely discontinued, but if Debian can't find enough developers to work on the platform then that shows them there isn't enough interest in order to be able to keep it alive.
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That's quite a good effort, managing to turn something quite unrelated into a rant about systemd.
I think you're 100% wrong, but good effort.
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SPARC certainly, and the same previously applied to alpha and hppa (and m68k). So long as the kernel and toolchain are well supported, porting isn't too onerous. But once the kernel and/or toolchain become flaky, it's dicey for development and end use. I used to be quite involved in powerpc porting (I got a G4 mac mini to run Debian powerpc, which was my primary development system for around five years). I quit doing powerpc work a couple of years back when the system was too slow for practical work com
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Sparc includes "sparc64", for which there is a shitton of hardware still out there. That people actively use. Removing "sparc32" I could understand, but all of SPARC?!? Yet mips, powerpc, and s390 are still there.
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I'd take that bet. Don't forget how much faster the ARM chips are. For example the A7 is twice the speed of the A6 which is almost 3x the speed of the A5. Admittedly the A8 is only a 20% speed burst but that's not bad relative to x86 especially for an off year. We'll find out over the next decade plus: can you make ARM faster more easily than you can x86 more efficient? But I'd bet on ARM.
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I was just using published benchmarks. What I've heard is that 20nm helped a bit, the GPU helped a lot. I hadn't heard anything about a decoder problem. So I meant what I wrote but I'm willing to be educated.
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Have you been watching Intel's product releases? Intel decided a couple of years ago that they weren't going to let ARM have the low-power server market and completely retooled their product line, starting with the avoton server line (C2xxx) and following up with the D-15xx family. (Remember how AMD keeps talking about interest from data centers? D-1540 retail availability has been tight for months because some major datacenter providers have bought essentially *all* of them...) Watching how fast Intel was
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I haven't been following it. The D-1540 seems like a nice offering. Smartphones are now 1/2 of the entire consumer electronics industry. I wouldn't underestimate the money going into ARM.
As far as ARM in server where I think ARM is likely to expand to first would be laptop. HP Chromebook 11 for example already uses this processor. Then it moves up market taking over some mainstream laptops. I could easily see for by end of decade for Apple's laptop lineup:
ARM for Macbook (OSX or a variant of iOS)
Inte
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Yes, ARM is used in a lot of phones. A phone chip is very different than a server chip. The question is whether any ARM vendor has the money to do *general purpose server* R&D in competition with intel. So far, everyone who has tried has either crashed & burned or provided fairly disappointing results. What they have going for them is power efficiency, which matters in embedded solutions (think raspberry pi & smaller) but isn't that compelling on full size laptops, desktops, or servers--saving a
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I'm thinking of ARM as a classic disruptive technology: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
i) ARM comes in first and takes customers who have requirements that x86 couldn't possibly satisfy: done
ii) ARM takes those customers who could be on x86 but gain tremendously from ARM: done
iii) ARM takes the least profitable least demanding customers from x86: happening with Chrome books -- in progress
iv) ARM takes over people core to x86 (laptops): not happening yet
v) ARM takes over more demanding users x86 deskto
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But the main reason they can sell anything in step iii is that intel doesn't care about those customers. It's not clear that ARM vendors are actually making much money on those products, and if intel cut its profit margin (i.e., if they cared enough about that particular market to actually go after it) then the ARM products would be economically untenable. There simply isn't a fundamental advantage there for the ARM vendors to take advantage of: their advantage is cost, and that's because intel has *decided
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Of course if the dominant player cut their margins they can preserve their position with their least profitable, least demanding customer. That's always the case with disruption from below. Microsoft did precisely that with netbooks almost a decade ago where they allowed netbooks to:
a) drive down the price of OEM Windows
b) not allow them to raise the specs for years and thus made the XP -> Vista upgrade less advantageous while often equally painful.
c) by forcing Microsoft to focus down market creat
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" Intel's least demand, lowest margin customers are ARM's high margin most demanding customers"
This is where I think you're wrong. The phones & the tablets are where the money is, the chromebooks are an uninteresting sideshow for the ARM vendors just as much as for Intel. There's no way they're making the same money on $200 netbooks as they are on $700 phones. They're also not putting any R&D into that segment, it just happens to move along with cobbled-together parts. It's not a path to anything.
"I
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Server I think is trickier. Let me throw out a hypothetical for say 2028.
Samsung releases a 1024 core SOC which is cool enough it can be used in a blade. Intel is using 16 core Xeons that require a full 1U. The Samsung cores are say each 1/2 as fast as the Intel cores. Everything needs to be custom compiled for the hardware but Samsung has their own fully supported distribution which supports cloud foundry, open stack... The complexity of the x86 makes Intel emulating these designs impossible.
Now th
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Sure, if we imagine that vendor X comes up with something implausibly advanced (scaling software to 1024 cores is hard, which is why single thread performance still matters), and intel actually goes backwards (you can buy a 32 core intel blade today) instead of developing new tech, then sure, vendor X can win.
Though nobody would buy it if it were tied to a single-vendor version of linux. BTDT, it sucks.
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OK adjust to 2048 vs 128. The point was that you are saying as long as x86 is a far better fit for servers it will be used for servers. Well of course. The question is what happens as the ARM economy gets larger than the x86 economy and the advantages of ARM design techniques come to dominate. Obviously I can't see what's likely many years in the future so I don't know what that will look like. For laptop it is obvious that SOC / power drive the change. Lighter and thinner. Beyond that is gets opaq
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They're selling more chips for less profit--Intel still has them trounced in terms of the R&D budget regardless of how many units they ship. All you have as an argument is "ARM is better so eventually it will actually be better", but the instruction set frankly just doesn't matter very much.
Note that Intel is a fairly large ARM vendor, and had other RISC products in the past. They still design & build such chips for embedded controllers, so it's not like they don't know how to do it, but if they tho
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How about this : the 2048 core ARM server appears as a collection of 256 8-core systems that appear virtually independent (such systems already exist : 16 core ARM that's a collection of four quad core on one die, with massive on-chip buses and on-die I/O and goodies but otherwise it's four CPU that are shared-nothing between them)
The Intel system appears as a single machine with 128 cores.
Intel wins, mostly.
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(a few years ago it was Cell - WTF happened there?)
In brief, compilers didn't do a good job automatically optimizing for the vector units, and it was not worth it for most people to do it manually. A few scientific groups experimented with it, but I think most of them have gone to GPUs or just plain old supercomputers.
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Sounds like a missed opportunity for open-source: the hardware companies making Cell should have invested in compiler engineers to make really good compilers for It (or just add onto gcc), and open-source all the work. Then lots of people would have wanted to use Cell processors because of the performance.
Making a nice product, and then making closed, proprietary tools that are needed to best use that product, isn't a winning business strategy. Give away the tools free so people are interested in trying o
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Videogame programmer here. It wasn't really a compiler optimization issue. There's no compiler on the planet that can perform high-level optimizations like that.
The real problem was that those vector units (SPEs) were highly specialized computational devices, best suited for churning through relatively simple, parallel tasks with a high volume of sequential data (e.g. media streams). Videogames, unfortunately, are loaded with tasks that require access to complex data sets and/or require lots of context s
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Videogame programmer here. It wasn't really a compiler optimization issue. There's no compiler on the planet that can perform high-level optimizations like that.
Compiler engineer here. The vectorisation for the Cell wasn't the hard part, it was the data management. Autovectorisation and even autoparallelisation are done by some compilers (the Sun compiler suite was doing both before the Cell was introduced), and can be aided by OpenMP or similar annotations. If the Cell SPUs had been cache-coherent and had direct access to DRAM, then there's a good chance that a bit of investment in the compiler would have given a big speedup. The problem of deciding when to DM
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Yep, I agree. It's all about the data access, as I mentioned. When I said "there's no compiler on the planet" etc, I was talking about high-level optimizations, which tends to involve a lot of code and data restructuring at a fundamental level. It's a much simpler task by comparison to auto-parallelize/auto-vectorize loops, etc.
If the Cell SPUs had been cache-coherent and had direct access to DRAM
But that's a pretty big "if" there, as the SPUs didn't perform well under circumstances in which compiler-level micro-optimizations would normally work, as the overhead of the DMA
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But that's a pretty big "if" there
Oh, I agree - you'd have added a lot of hardware complexity and probably more than you'd be able to fit if you wanted to keep 7 of them in the thermal envelope of the Cell.
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We've got ~20 of them. Those SuperClusters really DO kick some ass though ... when you get random users calling up saying "I don't know what you guys did but we've never had performance like this in 20 years" - yeah, color me impressed.
Isn't cheap, but a ton cheaper than second system effect.
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For certain applications that is a true statement about "nothing better/faster/stronger" than Sparc. The top TPC-C benchmark is by Oracle's T5-8 server, for example. Maybe your project's biggest problem is your attitude.