Friday, February 28, 2020

Fujitsu: Updates SPARC Solaris Roadmap



[Solaris Logo, courtesy Sun Microsystems]

Fujitsu: Updates SPARC Solaris Roadmap

Abstract:

SPARC has been an Open CPU Architecture, from the day Dave Patterson from UC Berkeley proposed what would become the SPARC architecture and became the industry-leading 64-bit microprocessor. Sun Microsystems engineers worked with Dave to define the SPARC architecture. Many manufacturers like Sun Microsystems, Fujitsu, and later Oracle briefly produced, and definitively produced the longest lasting 64-bit architecture in the market. Fujitsu continues to update their SPARC Roadmap!
 
 



[SPARC64 & Solaris Roadmap, courtesy Fujitsu Canada]

SPARC64 & Solaris Roadmap for 2020

In 2017, Fujitsu release a new hardware platform called the M12, with what was the fastest silicon in the world! The platform included Physical Domains, which allow for Physical Domains to get moved & split between various chassis when a system failure occurs. The industry was looking forward to an update to some of the finest system firmware in existence!






[SPARC64 & Solaris Roadmap, courtesy Fujitsu Global]

SPARC64 & Solaris Roadmap 2021

Fujitsu promised to have an updated SPARC64 chassis in 2020, It appears that chassis has slipped to 2021. One of the things this author requested of Oracle for their future Tx-2 Chassis was larger memory footprint. If we could see a Tx-2 chassis of 4TB or 8TB, that would be enough to bring these platforms ahead for the next 4-5 years, since processor speeds have topped-out, for the most part, or even decreased, on competing architectures, due to their inherent insecure instruction sets.




Conclusions

Oracle & Fujitsu had taken the market a very long way with SPARC architecture, with competitors still light years behind. The platforms are still the fastest in the market, file system most advanced in the industry, and firmware the most capable. There is a short wish-list that is needed, to fill some gaps, but that is for another blog entry.