[SunRescue] ANybody elses desktop look like this

[James Lockwood]

On Mon, 15 Jan 2001, Reagen Ward wrote:

> Works for a number of other companies I know..  What was the last Sun clone
> board made?  Not talking the SunMicro stuff, but a true clone board.  Been
> a while, I'd wager (though I don't know for sure).

Depends on what you mean by "clone".  If you mean a non-Sun designed board
with a SPARC CPU capable of running Solaris, they are currently in
production.  The most extreme of these is probably the Primepower line
made by Fujitsu, they use their own line of CPU's (SPARC64, not
UltraSparc).  HAL designed and shipped the SPARC64, the worlds first
64-bit SPARC implementation, beating Sun to market by a significant
margin.

Sun has historically been good at opening up their architecture.  SBus and
OpenBoot are both IEEE standards, and the publically available SPARC V9
spec is far more detailed than the analogous x86 specs.  The biggest
problem that the clone makers face is that Sun has a loyal following and
is covering a fairly wide section of the market.  Clone vendors are
generally niche players now.

-James