Fujitsu SPARC M10-1

Fujitsu built this server, shipped it worldwide, and then removed it from its own website. Every fujitsu.com link to the M10-1 — the data sheet, the installation guide, the service manual, the XSCF reference — now redirects, without a word, to a generic corporate landing page. The machine is still running in racks around the world, but the paperwork that came with it survives only in the Internet Archive. So this page is mostly a set of pointers into that archive, and the documentation links below carry their Wayback snapshots for exactly that reason.

The M10-1 is the single-socket, 1U entry in Fujitsu’s M10 SPARC line, below the four-socket M10-4 and the scale-out M10-4S. The arrangement around it is unusual. Fujitsu designs and manufactures the hardware, Oracle co-markets and sells it, and it runs Oracle Solaris. Two badges, one machine, which is why half the surviving documentation says Fujitsu on the cover and half says Oracle. Worldwide availability was announced on 10 April 2013, alongside the M10-4 and M10-4S, built around the then-new 16-core SPARC64 X processor — a date the joint Fujitsu/Oracle press release and HPCwire’s coverage that week both give.

There is a detail here I keep turning over. You buy the server, and then you license its cores. Fujitsu calls it CPU Activation: cores come online in pairs, from a minimum of two up to the chip’s physical maximum, and you can buy more activations later without taking the machine down. It is a mainframe idea wearing a rack-server case, capacity you own the metal for but pay to switch on. How many cores are actually lit on my unit is a question for the specifications page, not this one.

The processor generation is itself slightly ambiguous, and my unit sits right on the fault line. A later SPARC64 X+ option added on-chip SIMD, decimal floating point, and crypto instructions, and the vendor literature does not agree with itself on where the line falls. Fujitsu’s 2015 data sheet calls the 16-core 2.8 GHz part plain SPARC64 X, while Oracle’s 2016 material folds the same clock speed into the X+ generation — and the eBay listing I bought from describes a 16-core 2.8 GHz machine, exactly the SKU the two vendors label differently. So the naming conflict is not abstract here. It is the chip in this chassis. Which of the two names its own CPU FRU carries is a showhardconf question still open on the specifications page.

The vanishing is worth stating plainly, because it is the reason this page has the shape it does. As of 3 July 2026, none of Fujitsu’s own M10-1 documentation is reachable from a live URL. The old www.fujitsu.com/global paths redirect to global.fujitsu, which returns a 404 for the SPARC manuals, and the Japanese regional mirror dead-ends through a broken redirect host to the same generic homepage. The four Fujitsu manuals I care about — installation, service, system administration, XSCF reference — came back only from the Wayback Machine. Oracle’s mirror of the M10-1 data sheet and FAQ is, for now, still live, which is the one thing keeping a first-party spec sheet a click away rather than a crawl away.

Oracle lists the M10-1 among its end-of-life Fujitsu SPARC servers, paired with the SPARC M12-1 as the successor, so it is a used-market machine now. Oracle’s own last-ship list puts the final ship date at February 2018, but that figure comes from a single mirror of a document that otherwise sits behind Oracle’s paywalled support portal, so I carry it loosely rather than as a settled fact. I found no primary source for an original list price at all. Today the units turn up refurbished: a reseller had a 16-core 2.8 GHz configuration at about US$2,200 the day I looked, which is one listing on one day and nothing more.

What it is doing in this lab is straightforward. It is the SPARC build machine behind the release engineering platform, the SPARC64 target in a fleet meant to compile a kernel and toolchain for every architecture I keep here. It earns its rack space a second way too. Since 2022 Oracle has licensed Solaris 11.4 for personal, non-production use on a T4-or-later or Fujitsu SPARC processor, which puts the M10 generation about as new as SPARC hardware gets while still running current Solaris on a hobbyist’s terms. This one came secondhand off eBay, listed as an Oracle-badged M10-1 with a 16-core 2.8 GHz processor, 128 GB of memory as eight 16 GB DIMMs, two 600 GB SAS drives, and one part number, X1109A, that names none of those things: Oracle’s own PCI-card documentation identifies it as a dual-port 10GbE SFP+ adapter, so the listing bundled a network card. How many of the sixteen cores are actually switched on through CPU Activation is the one thing the listing could not tell me, and it stays open until I can read showcodactivation on the machine itself.

Sources: the 2015 Fujitsu M10-1 data sheet and the Oracle-branded data sheet and FAQ, cross-read against the M10-1 installation and service manuals for the structural details; the 2013 Fujitsu/Oracle availability announcement and HPCwire’s coverage for the launch date; and Oracle’s end-of-life and last-ship listings for the retirement dates, with the caveats above. All the Fujitsu documents were recovered from the Internet Archive, and the links carry those snapshots. The specifications, with the single-source figures and the two vendor conflicts called out, are on the specifications page.