Re: Anyone got any Axil material?

" From: Paul E Coad <[email protected]>
" 
" 
" Sorry if the attributions are messed up.  I have a list of Sparc 
" manufacturers (clones and Sparc-alikes). 
" 
" http://www.sonic.net/~coad/sparc_man.html
" 
" Any additions would be appreciated.  Some of the entries have some of their
" machines listed, but that part is totally incomplete.  

wow, that's some list!

auspex was sparc based but afaik not a clone; iirc they bought vme cpus
from sun and built out from there.

solbourne and fujitsu developed their own sparc-based systems, fujitsu
even making their own cpu chips.

i was working at a place that had a solbourne when they went under and
grumman took support over.  you couldn't max out both memory and cpus
but they had a larger backplane which allowed that in development.
grumman landfilled everything but field service.

as i heard it, sun made sunos mp-safe by putting a spinlock around
the entire kernel.  solbourne went in and rewrote the kernel for
finer-grained spinlocks around individual critical sections, greatly
improving mp performance.  none of those changes made it back to sun.

at least 2 clone makers made 50MHz ss2 clones.  the chipset maker -
weitek i believe - said it was good for that and wanted to make it
official, but sun said no.  alas, i don't recall the brands.

i've wondered if a weitek powerup would take 100...
________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Hay                                  the genius nature
internet rambler                            is to see what all have seen
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