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Blog One of the Best CPU ever made: Sparc Family
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  • Author Author: phoenixcomm
  • Date Created: 21 Dec 2023 6:33 PM Date Created
  • Views 2342 views
  • Likes 8 likes
  • Comments 3 comments
  • Supper Sparc
  • Sparc History
  • sparc
  • Ultra Sparc
  • Niagara
  • Sun Microsystems
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One of the Best CPU ever made: Sparc Family

phoenixcomm
phoenixcomm
21 Dec 2023

imageThe image family Includes image, SupperSparc, UltraSparc Sun Microsystems.  The Sparc was a RISK processor. A Sparc CPU original 32-bit architecture (SPARC V7) was used in Sun's Sun-4computer and workstation systems, which replaced the M68000-powered Sun-3. Most Sparcs had  32 general-purpose 32-bit registers. It could have 2 to 32 register windows, thus varying the number of registers from 40 to 520. The Operation System was at first Sun-OS a non-GUI. Shortly later they released Solaris, a full GUI, and X. Since Sun's inspection it always had an Ethernet connection. John Gage (Sun's 21st employee) coined the motto: "The Network is the Computer."

Due to SPARC International, SPARC is fully open, non-proprietary and royalty-free. In 1993, Sun introduced a 64-bit architecture which was first released in Sun's UltraSPARC processors in 1995.

As of September 2017, the latest commercial high-end SPARC processors are Fujitsu's SPARC64 XII (introduced in 2017 for its SPARC M12 server) and Oracle's SPARC M8 introduced in September 2017 for its high-end servers.

imageAnd there is this "Edison Group Whitepaper: Advantages and Efficiencies of Oracle SPARC S7 Server Over Commodity Alternatives"

The biggest and baddest CPU they ever made was the Niagara. Niagara 2 was a true beast. One die has 8 Sparc Cores that each went 8 ways! Plus 4Mb L2, 16 ways, associative, 4 dual channel memory controllers. 2 x 10 Gig Ethernet Ports, One PCIx8 port, 711 I/O ports all on a die, 342mm (16nm fab.),  Niagara 3 upped the badness to 16 cores and 16 ways = 256 CPUs! 

On Friday, September 1, 2017,  was a Black Day for the Sparc Heads around the world, after a round of layoffs that started in Oracle Labs in November 2016, Oracle terminated SPARC design after completing the M8. Much of the processor core development group in Austin, Texas, was dismissed, as were the teams in Santa Clara, California, and Burlington, Massachusetts.[4][5]

Out of the ruins of Sun Microsystems, lessons learned: intel and AMD helped to bury Sun.  Suns' tragic mistake was that they never seemed to get the message about speed! And now after the dust is settled, they could have used a fab at AMD to shrink the die and get fast clock speeds. AMD who got the rights to Simetric CPUs, and other cool things. Oracle now end up with the jewels of Sun Microsystem, the IP rights! included where Open Office, MySql, and JAVA which now is on version who knows? and broken backwards compatibility. 

~~ Cris H. 

Oh BTW here is a little ad that Sun had. 

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  • DAB
    DAB over 1 year ago

    Yes I remember when they were all the rage.

    Now only a few of us remember they ever existed.

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  • phoenixcomm
    phoenixcomm over 1 year ago in reply to shabaz

     shabaz Haha, I have one too.  ( but mine in down in the garage) I still have my 2 Ultra Sparc servers there as well. .The last time they were up was 2000  ~~ Cris H. 

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  • shabaz
    shabaz over 1 year ago

    Amazing machines. Full of neat features like rotating register sets! Also, Sun had one of the best debuggers (DBX) until GNU could reach the point of replacing the Sun compiler tools. Plus Solaris had DTrace. And there were all sorts of sophisticated tools for instrumenting and performance monitoring of C/C++ code, that I have never seen on other platforms since (Android being one of the exceptions).

    I still have a Sun Blade 2000 desktop machine (it's massive, you wouldn't want it on top of the desk!), although it's not been powered up in a decade. That beast was 64-bit, and could drive a couple of full-HD monitors (great for software development), when PCs were still running 32-bit Windows, and 1024x768 resolution was considered good.

    image

    (image source: Wikimedia Commons)

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