Hardware
The hardware in the lab, grouped by architecture. Each page says what the thing is and why it’s here, with specifications and preserved documentation where they exist.
Some pages are still mostly research. They should become more useful as I open the machines, boot them, break things, and write down what happened.
SPARC
Sun Microsystems' RISC architecture, introduced in 1987 and 64-bit since the V9 specification. Oracle and Fujitsu built its last server generations; Solaris is its native operating system.
- Fujitsu SPARC M10-1 A single-socket, 1U enterprise SPARC server that Fujitsu built and Oracle co-marketed, powered by a SPARC64 X or X+ processor.
POWER and PowerPC
IBM's RISC lineage. POWER built servers and supercomputers; PowerPC, its 1991 offshoot with Apple and Motorola, spent a decade in every Macintosh and lives on in embedded systems.
- Apple Power Mac G5 A Late 2005 PowerMac11,2, useful here because it is a real big-endian ppc64 Linux target.
- Genesi Efika PPC A small 32-bit PowerPC board built around the MPC5200B.
- Raptor Computing Talos II A POWER9 workstation with owner-controlled firmware.
RISC-V
An open, royalty-free instruction set from UC Berkeley, published in the 2010s. Anyone may implement it, and everyone does — from fifty-cent microcontrollers to server-class processors.
- SiFive HiFive Unmatched A RISC-V development board built around the Freedom U740.
MIPS
One of the first commercial RISC architectures, out of Stanford in the mid-eighties. It powered SGI workstations and nineties game consoles, and survives mostly in networking silicon.
- Onion Omega2 Pro A small MIPS board built around the MediaTek MT7688.
Arm
The most widely shipped instruction set there is, from Acorn roots in 1980s Cambridge. arm64 is its 64-bit architecture — phones, single-board computers, Apple silicon, and a growing share of servers.
- Apple Mac mini Models from 2011 through 2020, Intel through Apple silicon.
- ASUS Tinker Board S The eMMC version of ASUS's Raspberry Pi-shaped RK3288 board, and one of the few mass-market SBCs whose maker publishes the full schematic.
- Raspberry Pi An assortment spanning several generations.
- Traverse Ten64 An eight-core arm64 network board built around the NXP Layerscape LS1088A.
x86-64
AMD's 64-bit extension of Intel's x86, first shipped in 2003 and since then the default architecture of desktops, laptops, and servers.
- Apple Mac mini Models from 2011 through 2020, Intel through Apple silicon.
- Dell PowerEdge R730 An x86-64 rack server.
- Dell PowerEdge R740 An x86-64 rack server, a generation newer than the R730.
- Sophos XG/SG 210 rev 3 x86-64 appliances, running Linux as firewalls.