It was
announce in January 2013 that Oracle and Fujitsu had extended their development
partnership of Sparc technology with a new range of 'Athena' Sparc
T5 processors for entry and mid range servers, along with Sparc M5 processors. These
chips used for high end computing continues a roadmap set out by Sun
Microsystems in Sparc technology. Following the takeover of Sun Microsystems the
roadmap for Sparc technology remained uncertain until this announcement.
However the announcement has created a refocused interest in
mobile technology for the sparc technology. Sun Micro systems sold rebranded
laptops until 2005 when the company was purchased by Oracle. Specialist
manufacturer Tadpole was acquired by General Dynamics who consolidated the
range to specialist uses such as military field systems discontinuing large
scale manufacture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadpole_Computer. Further interest continued in Sparc by Accutech
Ultrasystems who launched a range of Sun Ray end user notebooks based
on SPARC / Solaris environments.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1
It remains to be seen if progression of leaner more effective
notebook manufacturing techniques will once again open the business case for
manufacture of Sparc based professional notebooks at a competitive point.
P.S. OiOS (Openindiana) according to Fijitsu has not yet been officially certified to
run these chips for further information about support please visit kernel
development project http://wiki.illumos.org
