On Mon, Aug 14, 2000 at 09:02:22AM -0700, Eduardo Horvath wrote:
> On Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Gerald Richter wrote:
> 
> > ... Has anyone contemplated the idea of making an sbus card with a
> > modern chipset? :o) I think it'd be cool to have like a double wide sbus
> > card with a voodoo 2 or TNT chipset...
> 
> There's little point in trying to get new chipsets running on SBus
> cards.

Especially since Sun doesn't sell any new Sbus based machines anymore.
Yes, Sun has discontinued manufacture of new Ultra2 workstations,
the last of the sbus only machines.  I suppose, technically, you
can still buy new sbus I/O cards for the Exx00 class machines, but
there is definately a point of dimishing returns.  Sun still sells
the remanufactured sbus machines, of course.

Another way to think of it like this -- the total number of sbus based
sparcs in the world is now probably at its maximum.  As they break,
die and are destroyed over the next couple of years, this number will
only go down.

(You can, of course, still get parts and replacement items from sun.
I'm not trying to scare anybody about the machines disappearing, just
that the number won't be increasing...)  I think it would very hard
to convince a manufacturer of hardware that it was worthwhile to
pursue selling into a small (and increasingly smaller as time goes
on) market -- namely sbus anything cards...

-Kurt