Fujitsu is ready to end of life SPARC64
SPARC is the latest in a long line of processors to be discontinued. MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC.
It was obvious whoever buy's Sun will kill the Fujitsu systems by increasing Solaris fees to cash cow the business.
Fujitsu has joined the parade of chip-design firms that are passing off all or part of their manufacturing to the giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). The Japanese megaconglomerate is struggling to put its financial house in order. Earlier this month, for example, it cut contractors' pay by 15 percent. And …
Fujitsu have a vested interest in SPARC/SPARC64. Fujitsu have been manufacturing the latest Sun servers such as the Mx000 range
Oracle purchased Sun so that they could control the Solaris OS better, as many DBAs chose Solaris as their platform of choice for Oracle Databases.
Sun and Oracle had a falling out since Sun purchased MySQL, and purchasing Sun means that Oracle now have an entire software/hardware platform for their Database
Probably just Matt waiting in his bedroom for Sun related articles so he can leap in with HP FUD!
Sun have used TI for years so there's no reason why Fujitsu shouldn't do similar & have lower (shared) foundry costs to get higher profits on chips made. AMD are doing the same with GlobalFoundries spinoff, hoping someone else leaps in, I think IBM may be in with them already.
As comparison HP sold off their entire chip designers in 2004 to Intel, they don't even design any more let alone spin out the FAB to a third party, getting close to Dells model as an assembler.
HP has to invest in the SX2000 chipset to support Itanic and the new windjammer chipset to support Tukwila . What most people don't realize is Tukwila is late because HP had problems with Windjammer. You dont bring out a new chip when your 95%+ marketshare partner does not have the chipset chip working and Nehalem kills it in the entry space. Intel took the opportunity to add DDR3 memory to Tukwila and the blame for being late. How nice of them.
SGI is gone from the Itanic market. Unisys will not do Tukwila. That leaves Group Bull, Hitachi and Fujitsu who have never sold enough units to justify the expense so I would expect them to not have Tukwila system either.