R.I.P. SPARC and Solaris

Requiescat in pace. © Spiria/iStock.

A page in IT history has turned. The San Jose Mercury News revealed that Oracle is about to lay off 983 employees at its Santa Clara facility. The cuts mostly affect the teams working on the company’s SPARC processor and Solaris operating system. Both these technologies came to Oracle along with the purchase of Sun Microsystems in 2010. SPARC processors, along with Acorn ones, were among the pioneers of RISC architecture at the beginning of the 1980s. Oracle simultaneously announced it was hiring 5,000 cloud-computing engineers.

⇨ IEEE Spectrum, “R.I.P. SPARC and Solaris.”