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  • Author Author: phoenixcomm
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One of the Best CPU ever made: Sparc Family

phoenixcomm

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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