Success Story

Bill Joy
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

The RISC architecture, pioneered by Dave Patterson at UC Berkeley, set the stage for what would become the SPARC architecture and would grow into the industry-leading 64-bit microprocessor. In 1984, a team of engineers from Sun Microsystems including Bill Joy (shown right), got together to define the SPARC architecture, based largely on Patterson's RISC specifications. Subsequently in 1986, Sun Microsystems published version 7 of the SPARC architecture and presented the first SPARC processor to the world. This 16MHz, 32-bit SPARC 86900 "Sunrise" processor was implemented on a pair of 20,000-gate Fujitsu gate-array chips, and was used to power the Sun-4/260 workstations. In 1989, realizing the potential impact of this forward-looking architecture, an independent governing body, SPARC International, was founded to oversee and guide the evolution of this open architecture. Today, this thriving community has 54 members.

Digital Camera
SPARClite-based

SPARC International published version 8 of the SPARC architecture in 1990, with several key enhancements such as hardware multiply/divide, MMU functions, and support for 128-bit floating-point operations. By the early-90's, over 35 SPARC implementations were in existence from vendors such as Ross Technology (HyperSPARC), Fujitsu (SPARClite) and Sun (SuperSPARC and microSPARC). The version 9 specification, introduced in 1993, added support for 64-bit addresses and data types, and includes processors from Sun (UltraSPARC) and Fujitsu (SPARC64). Over the years, the industry-leading SPARC architecture has powered a wide variety of systems including servers, workstations, laptops, VME/cPCI boards, storage systems, network switches, set-top boxes, and digital cameras.

Enterprise Server
ULTRASPARC III Cu-based

The founding architects of the RISC-based SPARC architecture had a vision of massive processor scalability that would provide enough "headroom" to meet the computing requirements of the future. Today, certain SPARC-based systems scale beyond 100 processors per system. Microprocessors in the next decade face numerous challenges to effectively process the anticipated workloads in areas such as multimedia, security, and communication. SPARC microprocessors, incorporating the unique combination of simplicity and scalability, are well-positioned to meet these challenges while maintaining binary compatibility to protect their customers' software investments.