SPARC

SPARC (from Scalable Processor Architecture) is a RISC instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced in mid-1987.

SPARC is a registered trademark of SPARC International, Inc., an organization established in 1989 to promote the SPARC architecture, manage SPARC trademarks, and provide conformance testing. Implementations of the original 32-bit SPARC architecture were initially designed and used in Sun's Sun-4 workstation and server systems, replacing their earlier Sun-3 systems based on the Motorola 68000 family of processors. Later, SPARC processors were used in SMP and CC-NUMA servers produced by Sun Microsystems, Solbourne and Fujitsu, among others, and designed for 64-bit operation.

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, Atmel, Cypress Semiconductor, and Fujitsu. As a result of SPARC International, the SPARC architecture is fully open and non-proprietary.

In March 2006 the complete design of Sun Microsystems' UltraSPARC T1 microprocessor was released in open-source form at OpenSPARC.net and named the OpenSPARC T1. In 2007 the design of Sun's UltraSPARC T2 microprocessor was also released in open-source form as OpenSPARC T2.

The most recent commercial iterations of the SPARC processor design are the Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd.'s "Venus" 128 GFLOP SPARC64 VIIIfx introduced June 2009, which is used in the 8 petaFLOPS Japanese supercomputer "K computer", and the SPARC T4 introduced by Oracle Corporation in September 2011; both are 8 core devices running at 2.0GHz and over 2.5GHz respectively.

SPARC64 X was introduced in August 2012.