SPARC
The SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a microprocessor architecture, which mainly be used in Oracle products. There are also other manufacturers, such as Fujitsu Technology Solutions (formerly Fujitsu Siemens Computers ).
History
Sun Microsystems developed since 1985 and marketed from 1987, the first generations of SPARC processors. In 1989 the non-profit organization SPARC International was established as a focal point for the development of open SPARC architecture.
Sun was at the time the development is already the second largest manufacturer of workstations running the Unix operating system ( market share 1985: Apollo Computer 41%, Sun 21%). With the SPARC processor, the company, as then, many manufacturers of workstations, a RISC processor architecture intended to create, the Motorola 68020 - replace and the i386 Roadrunner processors and should remain competitive for many years. The processors were manufactured by other manufacturers such as Texas Instruments and Fujitsu.
Sun brought his Sun -4 series out many workstations and servers that use the SPARC processor. But Fujitsu built up in the year 2005 or SPARC processors in their prime power systems a. Except SunOS or Solaris can be used on SPARC and Linux or the modern BSD variants. In 1995, the original 32 -bit architecture was extended to 64 -bit and marketed under the name Ultra Sparc. This architecture has additional units next to a deeper pipeline and some simple SIMD instructions (Visual Instruction Set (VIS ) ). The UltraSPARC standard has been four major versions, the current version is UltraSPARC T2 now.
Outstanding feature of the architecture is a set of registers (register file), which originally consisted of 128 32- bit registers. The CPU can access only a part of it, usually 32 directly. 24 of them, the CPU looks in a window that can be moved by software (→ register window ). This arguments and results of sub-programs without copying of registers by shifting the window can be passed.
The floating point unit can be used as 32 -fold 32 -bit single precision registers, 16x 64 -bit registers are used with double-precision or 8x 128 -bit register with four times the precision.
The current versions are 32-bit and 64-bit V8 V9. The SPARC V8 is completely Big Endian. The SPARC V9 instructions used in big- endian format, but supports both byte orders for data values . This can be both switched on instruction level, by using special instructions as well as for all the memory areas by a MMU setting. The latter is in particular used when access to memory areas of equipment, such as the set as the Little Endian PCI bus.
A simple version of a SPARC processor named LEON -1 in the hardware description language VHDL is freely available from the ESA. Both the design of the UltraSPARC T1 and UltraSPARC T2 of the published 2006 and 2007 under the open source GPL license via the OpenSPARC project and can be downloaded there. The design of the Sun Microsystems Sparc is published in the source code since the mid 1990s and freely usable.
There are also a number microcontroller implementations (eg Hitachi ), but partially own a compressed machine code and therefore are not binary compatible.
Since the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle SPARC now belongs to Oracle.
Models
Different implementations of the SPARC architecture, including Sun's successful Super Sparc and UltraSparc -I.