Definition: SPARC

(Scalable Performance ARChitecture) A family of RISC CPUs originally from Sun Microsystems that runs various operating systems, including Solaris, Linux and BSD versions. After development began in the mid-1980s by David Patterson of the University of California at Berkeley and Bill Joy of Sun, the first 32-bit SPARC chip was introduced in 1989 in Sun's SPARCstation 1. In 1995, a 64-bit line came out (see UltraSPARC). Prior to SPARC, Sun hardware used Motorola 68K CPUs. See RISC.

In 2017, Oracle, which had acquired Sun in 2010, ceased future development of the SPARC line.

SPARC International
Sun made it easy for third parties to make SPARC computers. In 1989, Sun and Fujitsu founded SPARC International to license the instruction set for only the cost of distributing the specifications (there was no commercial Internet at the time). SPARC International also provides compliance certification, and members have produced dozens of compatible SPARC chips for desktops, servers and set-top boxes.

OpenSPARC (Open Source SPARC)
In 2006, Sun released the UltraSPARC T1 circuit design under the GPL license (see RTL). OpenSPARC was the first state-of-the-art hardware to become open source, and projects included research beyond eight cores and a single threaded implementation for handhelds.

The First SPARCstation

In 1989, Sun introduced the SPARCstation 1, the first Sun computer with the SPARC chip. The SPARC line has been very successful. (Image courtesy of Sun Microsystems, Inc.)