[rescue] Intel monoculture

[Mark Linimon]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 09:46:01PM -0500, Carl R. Friend wrote:
> On 01/27/2017 05:36 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
> From my interpretation of things, the main fatality here is the
> SPARC architecture, and this brings us one step closer to an Intel
> monoculture -- and all the lovely things that those bring.

>From the FreeBSD perspective, arm64 (aka aarch64) is the Next Big
Thing in terms of architecture.  An example:

  http://www.cavium.com/pdfFiles/ThunderX_CRB_1S_Rev1.pdf

(note: I am not associated with Cavium).

There are other datacenter-targeted ARM machines; and, of course, the
omnipresent hobbyist-class machines.

FreeBSD is also working on the IBM Power archs, including the latest
generation (7? 8?)  Again, I'm not doing the work, but tracking it,
to see if I can get it working on my Power5 machine.

mips and its risc-v derivative actively being worked on for a) embedded
and b) research purposes, respectively.

But I think I'm going to be hard-pressed to argue that FreeBSD ought
to continue to support what we call sparc64 (aka sun4u) going forward.
This is quite disappointing.  (As previously noted, FreeBSD/sun4v was
never feature-complete.)  And I just finally got enough rack-slides
for everything late last year, too :-(

Anyone want some v210s and v240s?

mcl