http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/CDN/News.asp?sub=true&id=53588
The SPARC is dead, long live Sun... uh, I mean Oracle...
*sigh* Another half-decent chip architecture bites the dust. PA-RISC. AXP. MIPS. PPC. SPARC. (OK, I know PA-RISC got rolled into IA64... which is nearly dead, itself. And PPC is still alive and well in embedded platforms; I figure IBM's POWER chips have about the same life expectancty as HP's IA64.)
So when the dust settles, we'll be left with, what, x86-64 - which it'd be almost more accurate to say *happened* than was *designed*; PowerPC - carefully hidden under the hood, à la Cell processor or in millions of devices; and ARM - also carefully hidden under the hood.
Have I missed anything? Are there *any* chip architectures out there other than x86 that aren't dying or dead *in the public's mind*?