Network Management

System Vendor - CISC, RISC, EPIC Update

Abstract:
Since the decline of the Motorola 68000 CISC processor, RISC processors had been on the rise, to eventually be re-challenged by Intel with the release 80386 (and future models) with a Motorola-like flat memory model. UNIX vendors had standardized on the 68000, migrating to the RISC processors, and occasionally moving back to Intel. There has been the prediction of the decline of RISC, the loss of major processor families like ALPHA and MIPS, decline of POWER, rumor of end of EPIC processor family of Itanium by Intel, but some level of diversity surprisingly continues.

IBM Update: Power 7+
In 1982, IBM released a 68000 based workstation, based upon a 32/16bit processor. There was a decision to move to x86 on PC form factor, leveraging an existing relationship between Intel for the 8088, reducing cost by using an 16/8 bit processor, and gaining ready 8 bit part availability. This started the business PC market. IBM started to design their own RISC chip, called POWER, for their own UNIX workstations. The POWER multichip CPU modules were physically huge and very costly to manufacture - gluing together multiple chips onto a single carrier socket, limiting production quantities.

Apple-IBM-Motorola consortium started manufacturing PowerPC processors, bring POWER RISC architecture onto Apple desktops through simpler manufacturing process, but Apple discontinue it's use, not long after Apple purchased NeXT (this is the point where IBM POWER lost the desktop market.) In January 2008, IBM starting using QuickTransit, to provide x86 Linux software on their proprietary POWER processor, later ending in IBM purchasing Transitive. IBM almost purchased Sun, which would have allowed IBM to acquire SPARC, the industry volume leading commodity [non-multichip module] RISC and Solaris, the industry leading UNIX OS vendor.


It was noted in Network Management end of August 2011 that POWER 7+ was late. March 2012, Sony appears to have abandoned IBM POWER - this is when IBM POWER lost the gaming market. April 2012, IBM POWER 7+ was a half-year late. May 2012, IBM POWER 7+ was 7 months late. June 2012 - POWER 7+ is now 8 months late. Multi-chip modules are much simpler to bring to market, over chips designed into a single piece of silicon. For IBM to be so late, something bad must have happened. This does not bode well for AIX users.

HP Update: Itanium
In 2007, HP licensed a Transitive's QuickTransit, to provide Solaris software for HP's Intel based Itanium servers. Transitive made HP a global distributor in 2008, right before IBM bought Transitive, killing HP's path to move SPARC software onto x86 Linux or Itanium HP-UX. Itanium was the first, and possibly last, nearly mainstream Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (or EPIC) CPU architecture.

February 2009, HP describes Project Blackbird - HP acknowledges Solaris leading UNIX in United States, Itanium is on a "death march", HP considers purchasing Sun/Solaris. December 2009, RedHat kills Linux on Itanium. April 2010, Microsoft kills Windows on Itanium. December 2010, HP-UX was booting under Intel x86 - Project "Redwood" suggested a "last" Itanium chip in 2014, while recommending funding to move HP-UX to Intel x86.. On March 2011, Oracle stops new software development on Itanium. In November 2011, The Register described HP's Project Odyssey - building high-end Intel x86 systems, map Itanium HP-UX features to Intel x86, giving away Itanium/HP-UX software technology to Linux (not available under Itanium), and enhancing Windows with Microsoft. On May 30, 2012, HP revived an old slide dating back to June 25, 2010 from Project Kinetic, where HP-UX and other HP [OpenVMS and NonStop] operating systems will remain under Itanium, but with a twist: socket-level compatibility between Itanium and x86; a new UNIX will run under both Itanium and x86; driving mid-range features into Intel, Linux, and Windows.

The HP-UX, OpenVMS, and NonStop operating systems look dead because of their dependency on the doomed Itanium, whose architecture seems to have a trajectory to be moved to x86 while the OS's will have their features given to other operating systems. The movement to Solaris might be too late, unless HP decides to fix it's technology gap by partnering with an OpenSolaris distribution, like SGI did (see next section.) HP really needs something like Solaris Branded Zones, to encapsulate all 3 OS's.

SGI Update: OpenSolaris???
This is a most unusual update. In 1982, SGI was founded, selling UNIX IRIS Workstations using Mototola 68000 processors. Their OS eventually became AT&T System V - branded as IRIX. In 1986, the MIPS R2000 processor was released and incorporated into SGI workstations. In 1991, SGI went 64 bit with MIPS R4000 processor. SGI abandoned MIPS and moved to Intel Itanium, with their first Itanium workstation in 2001. In 2006, SGI abandoned Itanium for Intel x86, stopped developing IRIX. Rackable purchased SGI in 2009, renaming the entire company back to SGI. One version of the fall of SGI was recorded here.

Why go through all this effort, to remember Super Computer and Graphics Workstation creator SGI? It seems SGI is started to investigate UNIX again. SGI is using Nexenta for their SAN solution. Nexenta is based upon Illumos, formerly based upon OpenSolaris, which is the basis for Oracle's UNIX - Solaris 11. SGI embraces Solaris x86, for a portion of their solution, as HP considered in Project Redwood.
Dell Update: ARM???
The only thing stranger than fiction is reality. Dell would normally never appear in an article like this, but as other vendors are exiting the non-Intel x86 CISC marketplaces, Dell is about the only systems vendor who seems to be expanding out of the Intel x86 CISC market!


Now, May 29, 2012 - Dell announces a RISC machine, based upon the ARM processor! Project Copper was bundled under Dell's Enterprise web site tree, which is an indication where they are interested in pushing this new product. Will Dell learn from mistakes by IBM and HP, or corrections by SGI - by bundling a Market Leading UNIX... in the form of an OracleSolaris variant based upon Illumos?

Does an enterprise or manged service grade OS exist for ARM?

In June 2009, a release of OpenSolaris for ARM hit the wild. An example of the OpenSolaris booting on ARM was blogged. October 2009 the web page was created for the release of OpenSolaris for ARM - bringing the leading UNIX to the ARM processor family. Doug Scott mentioned he was reviving a port of OpenSolaris to ARM in October 2011 for ZFS on an ARM based SheevaPlug. In October 2011, ARM announces V8 processor release, migrating ARM from 32bit to 64bit architecture - which is where the OpenSolaris variants have all moved over to. Dell has an excellent opportunity.

Apple Update:Intel and ARM
This is, perhaps, one of the most interesting computer companies in history. Starting with 8 bit 6502 processors, they move to the Motorola 68000 CISC for their high-end publishing workstation, which they called the Macintosh. After kicking out the CEO & founder, Steve Jobs, Jobs started NeXT computer, based on Motorola 68000 processors and a UNIX core.

NeXT migrated their UNIX OS to Intel and went from being a workstation vendor to an OS vendor. Apple desperately needed a modern OS and almost went out of business. Apple purchased NeXT (getting the former CEO Steve Jobs back.) The combined company produced a UNIX based desktop with an OS called MacOS X (Macintosh Operating System 10 - based upon a NeXT Step UNIX OS core) placed on top of a PowerPC chip (designed by Apple, IBM, Motorola consortium - called AIM alliance.) Apple almost merged with Sun several times, collaborating on OpenSTEP (an open-sourced NeXT OS) during various aspects of this history. Soon, Apple created the iMac and the company started to turn around.






Most recently, Apple went through another migration - moving MacOS X back to it's NeXT Intel code base. Apple started to regain profitability and then they invested in a new set of consumer products. First, was the iPod, then the iPhone, then the iPad. Many of these new devices were based upon the ARM RISC processor, based upon MacOSX, but it was branded iOS. At this point, Apple exploded, becoming the number client vendor on the market, growing to such an extent that they could buy Intel with the spare cash they had on hand. Apple did the nearly impossible: created a new RISC based UNIX ecosystem based upon nothing.

Oracle/Sun: SPARC & Solaris Update
Early on, SUN built their platforms on Motorola 68000 family, as did most workstation vendors. They experimented with x86 for a short while, discontinued them.Solaris 9 was released on Intel, where Intel based UNIX vendors like NCR started migrating to Solaris from their SVR4 platforms like MP-RAS. Solaris 10 was released only on SPARC, Solaris was open-sourced as OpenSolaris (for both Intel and SPARC), and Solaris 11 was released on Intel and SPARC after Oracle purchased Sun. Interestingly, Solaris was being ported to PowerPC for a short period of time, with designers working on a OpenSTEP interface, during a time when Apple was not doing so well. Various Solaris variants, based upon the OpenSolaris project have hit the marketplace, with more distributions being released regularly.

From Sun's early history, Sun had traditionally been a 32 bit UNIX workstation vendor, migrated to a 64 bit UNIX workstations, moved from desktop UNIX workstations to UNIX servers, created the ultra-thin SunRay client to replace UNIX desktop workstations based upon 32 bit MicroSPARC, and surprisingly migrated their SunRay platform from MicroSPARC to ARM. Various releases of OpenSolaris had briefly touched ARM, but Solaris had primarily remained focused on SPARC and Intel with the SunRay's being a firmware based system.


As variants of RISC and the one EPIC processor have been found to be losing mind share, there have been two major exceptions: SPARC and ARM. Oracle continues to make thin-clients based upon ARM, with no roadmap. Oracle committed to a 5 year plan on SPARC, which has been executed either on-time or early for multiple processors. The SPARC T4 brought fast single-threaded platform with octal cores in 2011. A few months away, the SPARC T5 processor will bring 16 cores (again) to the SPARC family from Oracle, with features including compression and Oracle number processing in hardware.


Fujitsu: SPARC64 Update
Fujitsu is another interesting company, in this article. They did not organically grow into the UNIX movement from Motorola 68000 processors, like most other industry players - Fujitsu co-developed with Sun into the RISC UNIX market.
SPARC was developed by Sun Microsystems in 1986. Fujitsu fabricated the SPARC 86900 developed by Sun Microsystems, the first SPARC V7 architecture. SPARC International was founded in 1989, standardizing the 32 bit SPARC V8 multi-vendor architecture, creating the first non-proprietary RISC mainstream platforms. Andrew Heller, head of the RS6000 POWER based UNIX workstation group, left IBM and founded a new company in 1990, HAL Computer Systems, to develop a SPARC processor. In 1991, Fujitsu donated significant funding for a 44% stake, in return to use SPARC chips for their own systems. In 1992, the SPARClite was produced by Fujitsu. In 1993, Fujitsu purchased the rest of HAL, making Fujitsu the sole driver behind SPARC systems. The 64 bit SPARC V9 architecture was published in 1994 and Fujitsu shipped their first system in 1995. Fujitsu actually beat Sun to market with the first 64 bit SPARC processor.

While other CPU architectures were proprietary, with various corporations suing one another (i.e. Intel suing AMD) - SPARC brought a level of openness to the industry where vendors could cooperate (and occasionally bailed each other out, spreading the risk, while sharing the rewards from the UNIX market.) During a time when Sun's SPARC development pipeline ran dry, Fujitsu provided SPARC64 CPU's for Sun & Fujitsu high-end platforms. Sun purchased a third-party SPARC development house Afara Websystems, produced the T line of SPARC processors, and jointly sold the SPARC T line with Fujitsu. Solaris is standard on all of these platforms.


Fujitsu continues to push ahead with SPARC on their own platforms, holding the fastest computer in the world for over a year. What makes this a special SPARC is that Solaris is not at it's core - rather Linux is. It seems rather amazing that Linux departed from Intel Itanium, in order to become the OS of choice for the fastest computer in the world, on a Fujitsu SPARC platform.
In Conclusion
IBM POWER is barely breathing, with their latest road mapped CPU being so late that POWER is almost irrelevant, placing tremendous pressure on AIX. Intel Itanium vendors have been abandoning EPIC family for a half-decade with the final vendor closing it's shop. HP-UX is bound to Intel's EPIC Itanium, which is basically dead, with HP announcing development of an unknown new UNIX OS (hopefully, a Solaris fork based Illumos distribution.) Dell is releasing their first RISC platform, without an enterprise UNIX OS, hopefully they will investigate a Solaris fork Illumos distribution. SGI, who abandoned Intel's EPIC Itanum and their UNIX, is partnering with Solaris fork Illumos based distribution on Intel x86.

Oracle has been executing on SPARC, scoring highest performing industry benchmarks. Fujitsu continues to execute on SPARC, holding highest performing super-computer benchmarks. At this point, there is great opportunity for Solaris forked Illumos distribution - if they can get their act together to support SVR4 industry standards.


The UltraSPARC family of processors could be a bridge for Illumos developers to offer Fujitsu SPARC64 support on the fastest computer in the world. OpenIndiana may be closest to being able to offer such, not to mention get paid for older system support via resellers and new system support from Fujitsu (where Oracle shows little interesting in making Solaris run today.)
ARM offer great opportunities to extend Solaris family of architectures on the server, especially for Dell, who needs an enterprise OS. Of course, HP needs a new enterprise OS under the Intel platform.

If Illumos developers fail to understand how pivotal this point in time could be - this could be the end of an era and they would only have themselves to blame for their short-sightedness in not executing on the OpenSolaris source code tree during a very short time period where they can shine the brightest.

[IBM POWER5 Multi-Chip Module]
POWER, AMD, Itanium, and SPARC


[Sony Playstation]
POWER Loss

Remembering the loss of POWER on the desktop and anticipating the loss of POWER on embedded gaming consoles, it seems AMD might pick-up the gaming console business.

Whatever manufacturer AMD will choose, with its heterogeneous systems architecture (HSA), it's facing interesting new challenges. The signs indicating that Sony intents to switch to x86 processors and AMD GPUs for its next Playstation generation (2013/2014) are mounting. That Cell is not an option for Sony anymore already became largely clear when Cell partner IBM pulled out. With AMD's HSA concept, Sony could even fit the chip with its own extensions (FPGAs, media processors, DSPs and so on). And also Microsoft is supposed to be highly interested in an extended cooperation with AMD, for its next Xbox generation.

August of 2011, IBM unplugged POWER on their high-end Super Computer.

The Power 755 was supposed to be at the heart of the petaflops-busting "Blue Waters" super at the University of Illinois, but IBM pulled the plug on that deal last August.

POWER 7+ is more than 6 months late, with the press being virtually silent about it. It seems the high-end, mid-range, low-end, desktop, and embedded gaming consoles are all experiencing POWER problems with IBM.


[Intel Intanium Processor, courtesy Kazor-PT]
Itanium Death Knell

There has been much discussion from Oracle, regarding the ceasing of Itanium application development. It seems Larry Ellison was really "The Oracle" he projected to be - Itanuim may officially be dead in 2016. (new link)

Oracle's fraud counter-claim against Hewlett-Packard was dismissed by a Californian Superior Court, but during the proceedings it became clear that the Itanium line really doesn't have much of a future anymore. About two years after the eight-core chip Poulson, scheduled for this year, rolls out, the Kittson is supposed to follow, and we might still see the minimally improved Kittson+. Then, around 2016, the Itanium line will finally be ceased.

It seems, with how big of an issue Itanium discontinuance rumors were, that there would be more press regarding the now confirmed death of Itanium.


[Japan's Oakleaf-FX petaflopper at the University of Tokyo courtesy The Register]
Fujitsu SPARC64

As other RISC and VLIW vendors are finding themselves on sinking ships, Fujitsu releases another generation of SPARC CPU for their #1 performing supercomputer platforms.

Fujitsu has fired up the first installation of its PrimeHPC FX10 massively parallel Sparc-based supercomputer, a machine called Oakleaf-FX that weighs in at 1.13 petaflops of peak raw performance... For the PrimeHPC FX10 machines, Fujitsu has etched a new 16-core Sparc64-IXfx processor that runs at 1.85GHz

SPARC under Fujitsu doubles down and lives on - with a very occasional article about about the vendor who creates the fastest supercomputer in the world.


[SPARC public roadmap February 2012, courtesy Oracle]
Oracle SPARC M-Series

When Oracle adjusted the SPARC roadmap - another M-Series with 6x the throughput was noted. The 16-64 socket platform has virtually no one in the industry speculating, which baffles this author.

An "unknown" blogger posted a comment, regarding the 10 month old #1 Fujitsu SPARC Super Computer article:

Too bad we'll probably never see those chips in an Oracle Server.

This writer is not exactly sure where an M-Series with 6x throughput will come from (in the next 6 months), unless it comes from Fujitsu's Super Computer investment. It seems pretty clear that the processor has to come from Fujitsu.

Oracle/Fujitsu M-Series receiving a significant boost is very good news for SPARC - considering other vendors (IBM POWER and Intel/HP Itanium) continue their decline.


[Oracle Magazine 2012 Cover with SPARC T5]
Oracle T Series

The March 2012 edition of Oracle Magazine had an image of the SPARC T5 processor, slated to be released later this year. With a doubling of the cores per socket and a doubling of the sockets per chassis - this should be a very nice addition to the SPARC family.

The addition of compression engines (in the T5), in addition to the well-know crypto engines in the SPARC T Series will be a welcome capability addition for general purpose computing. Fewer proprietary crypto cards, proprietary network devices with crypto engines, and proprietary disk arrays (sporting compression, encryption, and dedup) will be needed - to achieve outstanding performance of general purpose applications running under SPARC.

Oracle Magazine provided a comforting photo of another next-generation open architecture SPARC chip (SPARC is an open specification designed & manufactured by multiple vendors), as single-vendor proprietary CPU's from IBM (POWER) and Intel (Itanium) continue to demonstrate their decline.

[aggregate computing power in the HPC list, by processor architecture]
SPARC: Life in the Fast Lane - 10 Months Later

Abstract:

SPARC, being a standard by which any vendor can create a binary compatible processor to leverage readily available applications, has been at the top of the HPC charts in the past, but noton the top for some time. About 10 months ago, Japan skyrocketed to the top of the Top 500 High Performance Computing systems world-wide. Fujitsu, a multi-vendor and open systems equipment manufacturer, designed a new SPARC processor. Fujitsu designed an Interconnect, CPU, Hardware Platform, File System, and Overall MPP System to make their mark.



[Rikagaku Kenkyusho (Riken) research lab in Kobe, Japan - image from The Register]

The Fujitsu MPP System

The Japanese Government funded Fujitsu to implementation the K machine under Project Keisoku. The Japanese government often referred to it as the Next Generation Supercomputer Project. The massively parallel processing (MPP) system cost approximately 1ドル.2bn and was implemented using standard general purpose CPU's, without the need to leverage graphic co-processor cards. The Register writes in November of 2011.

The K super is based on the "Venus" Sparc64-VIIIfx processor designed by Fujitsu and fabbed by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. The eight-core Venus chip clocks at 2GHz and delivers 128 gigaflops per chip, has a thermal efficiency of around 2.2 gigaflops per watt, and dissipates around 58 watts.

The K super has 22,032 four-socket blade servers fitted into 864 server racks to bring 705,024 cores...

Many newer systems are using graphical co-processor cards, in order to meet higher floating point processing requirements, so this system was a real shocker to the rest of the community. The former #1 contender established themselves about 8 months earlier, the Chinese Government funded Tianhe-1A - a CPU-GPU hybrid system using Intel CPU, NVidia GPU, and Chinese designed SPARC CPU's.

Many speculated that HPC systems could no longer compete without GPU's, yet Fujitsu's SPARC platform proved them wrong, by a long run. The Fujitsu general purpose SPARC super computer has remained #1 for longer than the former CPU-GPU hybrid.


[Fujitsu's PrimeHPC FX10 upgrade to the K super computer - image from The Register]
The Building Blocks

Fujitsu, who has a long history of building mainframe class systems, as well as SPARC based processors, decided to commoditize their #1 K super computer, in the form of the PrimeHPC FX10. The Register also writes about it's massive scalability in November of 2011:

The PrimeHPC FX10 machine will scale from 4 to 1,024 cabinets, sporting between 384 and 98,304 nodes. In the K architecture, each socket on the four-socket blade is a unique node in the cluster. This is also true for the FX10 super.

The new building block uses 16 core processors, instead of 8 core processors, granting the overall commercial system a total high-end capacity of 1,572,864 cores - double the capacity of their #1 super computer, just released months earlier.

[Top 500 super interconnects share, by system capacity - courtesy The Register]
The Interconnect

The Interconnect is sometimes the least interesting component in a system. Some systems use 1 or 10 gigabit ethernet, others use infiniband. In the case of the Fujitsu system, their "secret sause" is their proprietary "Tofu" interconnect.

[Fujitsu's FEFS is based upon Oracle Lustre]

The File System

The File System used by the Fujitsu's Super Computers are both based upon Sun/Oracle Lustre file system - called FEFS or Fujitsu Exabyte File System.


[The PrimeHPC blade server with Tofu interconnect chips on the left - courtesy The Register]
Four Nodes per Blade Card

In the MPP world, a node is sometimes considered a chassis, other times a card. In Fujitsu's SPARC64 PrimeHPC system, a node is built around a socket on a card. With the K super computer, there were 8 cores per socket. With the new Prime HPC blade, each socket holds 16 cores.


[The SPARC64 IXfx floorplan - courtesy Fujitsu]
The SPARC Socket

The SPARC VIIIfx and IXfx are not terribly unique in the marketplace. Sun and Oracle had offered 8 and 16 core processors before Fujitsu - but Sun, Oracle, and Fujitsu were the market leaders - and all three companies were/are doing an Open Systems based SPARC design. While the rest of the HPC market seemed to concentrate on proprietary CPU vendors (perhaps this made these three companies unique.

SPARC Comparison	SPARC64TM VIIIfx	SPARC64TM IXfx
Number of cores	8 cores/socket	16 cores/socket
Clock frequency	2 GHz	1.848 GHz
L1 Cache	I: 32KB/core, D: 32KB/core	I: 32KB/core, D: 32KB/core
L2 Cache	6 MB (Shared cache)	12 MB (Shared cache)
Peak performance	128 Gigaflops	236.5 Gigaflops
Memory throughput	64 GB/s	85 GB/s
Power consumption	58 Watts	110 Watts
Process	45 nm	40 nm
Die size	22.7 mm × 22.6 mm	21.9 mm × 22.9 mm
Number of Transistors	~ 760 million	~ 1.87 billion

[The SPARC64 IXfx core - courtesy Fujitsu]
The SPARC Core

The SPARC64 core is an extension of the SPARC V9 architecture. Various enhancements were made by Fujitsu to each core. Some of the features are as follows:

• 64 Bit Processing


• Standard SPARC-V9 instruction set, with enhancements


• Floating Point Registers expanded from 32 to 256


• Combined Integer and Floating Point Unit


• 2 SIMD / Cycle (Single instruction, multiple data)


• 8 Floating Point / Cycle


• New Floating Point Trigonometric functions


• New Floating Point Reciprocal Approximation of divide/Square-root


• New Floating Point Minimum and Maximum Operations

[The SPARC64 history and roadmap - courtesy Fujitsu]
The SPARC Roadmap

The SPARC64 processor has a long history, which pre-dates the acquisition by Fujitsu. The latest processor appears to be just another in the long progression of the SPARC64 line. It appears that Sun dropped SPARC out of the HPC arena, after being purchased by Oracle - but it also appears that Fujitsu decided to aggressively pursue this arena.

Conclusions

Both Oracle and Fujitsu are independantly pursuing SPARC in disjoint, non-overlapping, markets. They are not the only vendors creating new production quality SPARC processors (as noted by the former #1 HPC system from China.) SPARC appears to have a long road ahead, being implemented by multiple vendors, and each implementation performing best in it's class.

[Sony Playstation 3]

POWER: Loss of Sony PlayStation Platform

The Market Leaders:
Sun Microsystems introduced the RISC architecture SPARC in mid 1987. SPARC was registered as trademark of SPARC International, Inc., an organization established in 1989 to promote the SPARC architecture, manage SPARC trademarks, and provide conformance testing. Sun produced their systems on OpenFirmware, releasing it to the IEEE for standardization. SPARC found it's home on workstations, spread to servers, and even to embedded systems such as the Sun Ray in the late 1990's.


[IBM POWER5 Multi-Chip Module]

The Rise of POWER:
IBM produced the POWER architecture, an expensive multi-chip module which provided for outstanding performance at low volumes. Apple, IBM, Motorola, and decided October 2, 1991 to co-develop the POWER platform to expand the ecosystem for RISC processors under the AIM Alliance - to produce a single silicon chip high-volume RISC platform called PowerPC.

The Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) for PowerPC was produced in 1994. CHRP platforms would require IEEE OpenFirmware (created by Sun) in 1995. To expand the POWER ecosystem, the "power.org" site was founded in 2004 by IBM, 15 other companies joined as members, nearly 20 years after SPARC. In 2006, the Sony Playstation released the PlayStation 3, under POWER architecture, expanding POWER into the gaming/entertainment sector.


SPARC Marches On:
In the 2000's, SPARC was no longer being used in the Sun Ray, but multiple vendors continue to produce SPARC processors. SPARC is an open specification, not a proprietary architecture, leaving multiple sources for this RISC processor. To continue to make this point, Sun Microsystems completely open-sourced their UltraSPARC T1 CPU in 2006, making SPARC it freely available for any manufacturer to produce - referring the architecture to OpenSPARC.

Fujitsu releases high-performance 8 core SPARC64 VIIIfx in 2009. The 16 core SPARC T3 was released by SUN/Oracle in 2010. Fujitsu releases another 8 core SPARC64 VII+ in 2010. Russia releases MCST-4R in 2010. Oracle released the 8 core SPARC T4 in 2011. Fujitsu is releasing SPARC64 IXfx in 2012. Oracle is projected to release the SPARC T5 in 2012.


The Decline of IBM POWER:
Apple abandoned PowerPC for Intel in 2006, leaving IBM POWER without a desktop partner. Sony is rumored to discontinue use of IBM POWER for their gaming consoles in the PlayStation 4, starting the decline of POWER in the gaming market. POWER7+ from IBM is now nearly a half-year late and IBM has still not delivered as of March 2012.