[SPARCbook] Considering shutting down this list

[Miles Nordin]

>>>>> "rk" == Rich Kulawiec <rsk at gsp.org> writes:

    rk> Sun itself hasn't built a (modern) portable based around the
    rk> Sparc CPU.

Sun itself hasn't built a modern SPARC CPU.  The T1 was a brilliant
trick, but it's not a modern CPU, and they don't claim otherwise.
It's more like a bunch of USII's replicated onto one chip, the old
design taking advantage of commodity manufacturing improvements.  a
great existence proof of how clod-like and clueless hardware designers
are about software.  I almost admire it more for its subversiveness,
but it's not a modern CPU.

What'd be interesting for me is an extremely-long-battery-life
SPARC-based laptop which could run Solaris, with NAND FLASH and a
low-power screen (either a small screen like N810 or a reflective
screen like ebook readers).  SPARC CPU's probably about as fast as
these ancient laptops are used in digital cameras.  Such a mini-laptop
could be stupidly cheap considering these cameras' prices, if you
could convince enough people to buy it.  I'm not sure the cheap sparc
chips are sparcv9 though---they might be 32-bit, or missing other
solaris-needed features.

but I can't imagine anyone making such a device.  Linux will rule that
slot for years with its flash-friendly filesystems, transparent
sneakyness-free license, broad CPU support, large talent pool---N810,
googlephone, u.s.w., and since wince doesn't run on sparc (is that
true?) these linux pda-ish devices tend to be ARM or MIPS.  It's too
bad because maybe a low-power SPARC chip could use Sun's JIT, which
would almost be a bigger subversive trick than porting Darwin to the
iPhone.  

S was supposed to stand for Scalable from the beginning, which is the
part that laptops should have used, but now it just seems to stand for
Obscure.  The only people who paid retail for those heavy, hot laptops
were companies locked into proprietary software that only had a SPARC
build, and no one cares about that any more.  The situation's actually
reversed, where for example harlequin gives you an enormous discount
on their lisp environment for x86, even Linux/x86, but for SPARC
there's a huge soak-the-strange-rich-desperate-customer premium.

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