Probably fair about SPARC. I'm not familiar enough to have any real informed opinions about it. I've heard a fair bit of complaints about painful quirks, though. I guess one cool thing SPARC has had for a long time is memory tagging -- not sure if anything else other than ARM does, but I'm not sure how ARM's implementation compares to SPARC ADI [1].
I don't know of anyone really making modern SPARC designs either, though; pretty sure Fujitsu is focused on ARM now, and I don't know if Oracle is doing anything really, and I'm not super sure, but although Elbrus has built-in x86-translation of all things, I'm not sure any of MCST's relatively recent stuff can still run SPARC binaries.
I think SPARC mostly still alive because of legacy enterprise stuff and because there are existing radiation-hardened designs like LEON that get used for satellites and things like that [2], also I think MCST still produces some of their older SPARC stuff for Russian missile systems [3] since I imagine it takes forever for older stuff to get fully phased out and replaced entirely
> I don't know of anyone really making modern SPARC designs either,
Development seems pretty dead now. Maybe some telco-grade stuff, but that seems to be the whole of it. Not sure how long it'll last.
Unless I'm very wrong, their last releases were in 2017: the SPARC M8, T8 and Fujitsu's SPARC XII. It seems to have found a home in weapon systems though.
I don't know of anyone really making modern SPARC designs either, though; pretty sure Fujitsu is focused on ARM now, and I don't know if Oracle is doing anything really, and I'm not super sure, but although Elbrus has built-in x86-translation of all things, I'm not sure any of MCST's relatively recent stuff can still run SPARC binaries.
I think SPARC mostly still alive because of legacy enterprise stuff and because there are existing radiation-hardened designs like LEON that get used for satellites and things like that [2], also I think MCST still produces some of their older SPARC stuff for Russian missile systems [3] since I imagine it takes forever for older stuff to get fully phased out and replaced entirely
[1]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.19/sparc/adi.html / https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53394_01/html/E54815/gqajs.html
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON
[3]: Elbrus 90 used in S-400 - https://web.archive.org/web/20181027225122/http://www.pravda...