On Sun, 3 Aug 2008, Tim Scanlon wrote: > I noticed today that Sun has stopped selling Sparc based desktop > machines. I was sort of shocked by this to say the least. I have to > support applications that have endian issues, and this could be > painful.
This is a pity. It looks like Sun is dumping the UltraSPARC IIi, and IIIi as fast as they can, probably due to the TI foundry issue. Since the SPARC desktops were so slow by today's standards, their only (presumed) valid use was to support development of applications to run on SPARC server hardware. It is interesting that most computer users tend to think that almost all computer hardware is little endian and that big endian has "failed". However, it turns out that big endian hardware is selling extremely well these days and exists in most modern homes. The three top-selling game machines are PowerPC based. Millions of cell phones use big-endian CPUs. The fastest currently deployed CPU uses the Power architecture. Apple recently purchased a successful PowerPC CPU vendor. Maybe you can pick up a Playstation 3 and boot Linux on it as a big-endian development platform. Or maybe help port OpenSolaris to it. Even easier would be to pick up some PowerPC Apple hardware on eBay. Bob ====================================== Bob Friesenhahn bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
