Bob Friesenhahn wrote: > 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. > ZFS supports "adaptive endian-ness" which means this filesystem is endian-neutral so at least one class of endian issues is behind us. The fact that IBM still supports Power architecture means Linux and some related GNU applications and libraries should get some shake-out on big-endian CPUs. If you're maintaining in-house or proprietary big-endian software, I'd agree with what others have already suggested, move the applications/development to a Sparc/Rock server and put as much of the user interface on a Sun ray or X64 desktop as is appropriate for your application. If you're maintaining Fortran code, look into Sun Studio 10's -xfilebyteorder for raw binary file I/O issues.
> 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/ > > _______________________________________________ > desktop-discuss mailing list > desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/desktop-discuss/attachments/20080807/4a5ba964/attachment.html>
