Sun Microelectronics
9
Preface
Overview
Welcome to the UltraSPARC User’s Manual. This book contains information about
the architecture and programming of UltraSPARC
, Sun Microsystems’ family of
SPARC-V9-compliant processors. It describes the UltraSPARC-I and
UltraSPARC-II processor implementasions.
This book contains information on:
•
The UltraSPARC system architecture
•
The components that make up an UltraSPARC processor
•
Memory and low-level system management, including detailed information
needed by operating system programmers
•
Extensions to and implementation-dependencies of the SPARC-V9 architecture
•
Techniques for managing the pipeline and for producing optimized code
A Brief History of SPARC
SPARC stands for Scalable Processor ARChitecture, which was first announced in
1987. Unlike more traditional processor architectures, SPARC is an open stan-
dard, freely available through license from SPARC International, Inc. Any compa-
ny that obtains a license can manufacture and sell a SPARC-compliant processor.
By the early 1990s SPARC processors we available from over a dozen different
vendors, and over 8,000 SPARC-compliant applications had been certified.
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