There was a time when SPARC CPUs were the sole realm of pricey Sun workstations, but now you can put one on an FPGA with just a little trouble. The problem is you need a fairly big FPGA which isn’t always cheap unless someone goes out of business and you get lucky. [Ttsiodras] picked up a Pano logic thin client. Pano went under and their entire inventory is out on the surplus market at cheap prices. With a little FPGA magic, you can turn a few bucks into a SPARC-based computer.
The insides of the workstation have a Spartan 6 FPGA inside and you’ll need to solder in some JTAG wires, but that shouldn’t put anybody here off. Of course, the Spartan 6 isn’t the newest tech so you’ll have to get an old version of the Xilinx tools but that’s not hard either. However, there is a strange irony you’ll need to be aware of if you use Linux.
