Another piece of not so pleasant news - the RISC processor bunch has lost yet another member with PA-RISC being announced to be finally End-of-Life'd by HP. You can no longer order HP 9000 even if you really wanted to. Here is the complete announcement from the HP site:

http://www.hp.com/products1/evolution/9000/eol_announcement.html

It is sad to see this processor go especially considering the fact that there was no technical reason for retiring it. PA-RISC was a very strong architecture with a significant following especially in the technical computing circles and the only reason HP mothballed it is because Intel Itanium was supposed to be the next best thing since sliced bread. Well, we know how that turned out to be - Itanium is barely dragging its own weight and even SPARC, which is much criticized by HP as a dwindling platform, is outshipping Itanium by hefty margin on unit shipments. And to this day there are hardly any indications that Itanium is going to live up even to a fraction of the original hype created by HP and Intel. At the end of the day it turned out that Itanium was more powerful as a propaganda machine than as a processor.

As sad as it is, all big three Unix workstation vendors (Sun, HP and IBM) have terminated their respective RISC workstation product lines. Which means that there are no more Sun Ultras or Blades, IBM IntelliStations or HP Visualize boxes much coveted in the not so distant past. I'm particularly impartial to Sun workstations and I think it is a big loss to the SPARC ecosystem as a whole. Regardless of what they tell you I think it is essential to have a workstation that is binary compatible with the big iron that is sitting in the data center. I think it is essential for development and system administration in any large shop and many sysadmin would probably attest to that. I'm not sure if Sun has been blinded by the bean counters prompting to cut the entire SPARC workstation product line, but I hope someone at Sun wakes up and realizes that the workstations are a big part of SPARC ecosystem and perhaps even it has to be subsidized to keep the SPARC followers happy. Sun should probably go as far as selling their SPARC based workstations at cost or even below cost to make it as easy as possible for the users to be comfortable and continue developing on the SPARC platform. The workstation would not have to be super fast as binary compatibility with the big iron is what counts the most. If you're as impartial as I'm about the continued life of SPARC on the desktop, please take your time to sign a petition to Sun to bring the SPARC workstation product line back:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/renew-sparc-workstations