Re: [OT/For Sale] Sun SPARC hardware collection in Germany

[Dennis Clarke <dclarke%blastwave.org@localhost>]

On 9/15/26 21:39, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> On 9/15/2026 5:32 PM, Dennis Clarke wrote:
> > On 9/15/26 16:36, Aaron B. wrote:
> > > On Tue, 15 Sep 2026 15:13:38 -0400
> > > Dennis Clarke <dclarke%blastwave.org@localhost> wrote:
> > >
> > > > with the exception of a single "new" SPARC S7-2 server. It is a 128- 
> > > > core
> > > > wonder beast with 256G of memory. Sadly it can only run Solaris 11.4 
> > > > and
> > > > my attempts with NetBSD have all failed.
> > >
> > > OpenBSD supports this model: https://www.openbsd.org/sparc64.html
> <snip>
> > > Which would be a good thing to have happen - lots of older sun4v
> > > hardware is out there for quite cheap, with plenty of life left. My
> > > Netra T2000 is still going strong; I haven't had problems finding
> > > parts for this 20 years old machine.
> >
> > Some of the sun4v hardware can sport a lot of active cores. Sadly the 
> > floating point unit in the early units was a single FPU core surrounded
> > by a matrix of eight SPARCv9 type cores. A single FPU instruction would
> > and could wait for seven or more clock cycles just to get access to
> > the FPU. Great for integer stuff however.
>
>
> While I believe your description of the v9 FPU is correct, I wonder how 
> frequently that was an issue for the sorts of workloads most people 
> would put on a v9 machine.

A whole whack of SPARC cores can be great at pushing numbers. As for the
very early sun4v, well, it was enough of a problem that many people
would rather just wait for the next version to ship. Better yet, get the
mighty Fujitsu SUN4U SPARC64 units like M4000 upwards. If you have more
money than brains the monster M8 is a sweet machine.

--
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Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken