SPARC

SPARC (Scalable Processor ARChitecture) is a pure big-endian RISC microprocessor architecture originally designed in 1985 by Sun Microsystems.

Related Topics:
Pure big-endian - RISC - Microprocessor - 1985 - Sun Microsystems

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SPARC is a registered trademark of SPARC International, Inc., an organisation established in 1989 to promote the SPARC and to provide conformance testing. SPARC International was intended to "open" the SPARC architecture to make a larger ecosystem for the design, which has been licensed to several manufacturers, including Texas Instruments, Cypress Semiconductor, and Fujitsu.

Related Topics:
1989 - Texas Instruments - Cypress Semiconductor - Fujitsu

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As a result of SPARC International, the SPARC architecture is fully open and non-proprietary: there's a fully open source implementation called LEON, written in VHDL. Its source code is available under the LGPL.

Related Topics:
LEON - VHDL - LGPL

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Implementations of SPARC architecture were initially designed and used for workstations, and then used for larger SMP servers produced by Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu among others. SPARC machines are generally synonymous with Solaris, the operating system (OS) from Sun designed for SPARC. However various ports from operating systems like NeXTSTEP, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD work on SPARC processors.

Related Topics:
SMP - Sun Microsystems - Fujitsu - Solaris - Operating system - Sun - NeXTSTEP - Linux - FreeBSD - OpenBSD - NetBSD

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There have been several revisions of the architecture, the most recent being versions 8 and 9.

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