Mike Marion wrote:
Other then those few tests, the box sat completely idle until they came
and took it.
Yeah. Fortunately, DEC had their own tools. They should have sold
those along with the boxes. They could have put Cadence out of business.
Our purchases are driven by the engineers needs, which are driven by
tools.
Ayup. And the tools vendors had *zero* incentive to port those tools
because suddenly they would be selling fewer licenses.
The EDA vendors *liked* the fact that it was called Slowaris.
Those same vendors had to be dragged kicking and screaming to x86 for
exactly the same reason.
For ages there, Solaris on SPARC was king. Now Linux (RHEL and SLES) on
x86_64 is dominating. Could change again, but I doubt it'll be anytime
soon.
Oh, and yes, the "Solaris is the only good OS" types have pressured the
ISVs a ton to go Sol x86 but the ISVs don't seem to want to. I think
they figure they put enough into moving to Linux already and don't want
to bother since it's the same arch but would still be another platform
for them to have to support. Heck, getting them to add SLES was hard
enough... and we've been pushing for LSB really.
Two things:
A) The ISV's all *hate* DTrace.
Cadence went so far as to ask Sun to exempt them from it (Sun didn't).
DTrace doesn't work on Linux x86; it does on Solaris x86.
B) Linux is just a touch unstable when pushed hard
So, you still need a couple of those Sparc Solaris licenses floating
around for the important jobs. Since those boxes are slower and slower
to upgrade, that means more licenses sold.
If you do Solaris x86, suddenly these two things go away.
-a
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