The History of SPARC Processor

When we talk about Sun Microsystem’s hardware, SPARC will always be the first that come directly into our mind. Indeed, SPARC (Scalable Processor ARChitecture) has been Sun Microsystem’s flagship processor architecture for over note years.
With Sun’s dedication to innovation and flexibility, the processor had gone through many revisions over the years in an endeavor to stay on the cutting edge. Eighty-eight of the 500 super-computers in the world used SPARC by June 2002.

In 1985, the SPARC microprocessor instruction set architecture was originally designed, but quickly underwent a 32-bit revision in 1986 (SPARC Version 7) They first designed for use in Sun-4 workstation and server systems, replacing the Motorola 68000 family. SPARC processors apace gained in popularity, and were utilized in SMP servers built by, among others, Sun, Solbourne, and Fujitsu.
Even though the processor was designed for and used in SunOS (Solaris), SPARC processor can be used with other operating systems, such as FreeBSD,OpenBSD,NetBSD and Linux. In attempt to increase processing speed as much as possible, The SPARC instruction set was designed to be minimalist, with as few feature as possible (including the inability to multiply or divide)
The SPARC processor was also designed to be scalable by allowing all types of processor from tiny dedicated processors to huge server-level ones to use the same core instruction set. The first example of SPARC processor contained 128 general-purpose registers-eight global, 32 available to software, and 24 for a run window to transfer duty call parameters and return values.
The SPARC Version 8 (V8), the enhancement architecture, was released in 1990. Adding 16 highly flexible double-precision registers instead of the previous 32. Its instruction set regained the multiply and divide. Every double-precision register, could be utilized as either two single-precision registers (for a total of 32 single-precision registers) or, by using an odd-even pair of double precisions-registers, be utilized as a quad-precision run (resulting in 8 sib precision registers
In 1993, SPARC Version 9 (56-bit data and addressing), also known as SPARC64, was released. Adding sixteen more double-precision registers that could be combined and used as eight quad-precision registers. But could not be used a 32 single-precision registers.
In third-quarter of 2005, Sun Microsystem released the UltraSPARC T1 source code to an open-source project called OpenSPARC. Nowadays, three fully open source versions of the SPARC architecture exists. LEON, a 32-bit, single thread SPARC V8 version, OpenSPARC T1, a 64-bit, 32-thread version of SPARC V9, and OpenSPARC T2, a 64-bit, 64-thread version of SPARC V9.