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I did some looking, and it appears that OpenSparc is copyleft (GPLv2) which, combined with Oracle Yuck, may be a huge reason it is held back from wider interest. However, OpenPower stuff seems to all be Apache licensed from their repos. I could not find the RISC-V license, but it appears to be extremely liberal as well.

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OpenSPARC is apparently used as a base for the Elbrus CPU line in Russia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus-8S

That specific chip I linked to the article about has the ability to run x86 code via translation and they claim it can run Windows. Guess that solves the chicken and egg issue, but the biggest problem is who would be willing to fab it for them, sad that politics and war interrupted this.

Interesting! The article says windows XP and 7, which are pretty old and unsupported now. But it is a very interesting approach.

Elbrus are VLIW/EPIC, based on home-grown architecture.

The SPARC-based one is the old MCST R1000.

>who would be willing to fab it

Before the conflict, they used TSMC. Now, AFAIK, the only fab available is Mikron, located in Zelenograd near Moscow. And only 90nm process. There were some rumors about switching to SMIC, but I have not heard any updates for quite some time.

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