In the history of evolution of the processors, SPARC holds a special place. It was the flagship of Sun Microsystems, then king of the performance servers. Somewhere during the journey it lost its place to the onslaught of the high performance and multicore brigade of Intel/AMD chips. IBM Power was/is a formidable opponent too. Oracle buying up Sun added to the uncertainties.
Besides the version changes and the improvements dealt in the article, what is interesting is that this was a shining example of the RISC cult that shook the world computing world quite a bit. RISC philosophy talks about 80% of the computation work being done by about 20% of the instructions of any computer system. So, the proponents advocated simplifying the ISA of processors. Just the raw available power available with the CISC processors are so much that this efficiency debate has gone away. That Sparc was an important mileston.er of the silicon pro.ecressor evolution history, that it held an important place for 20 odd years, is undeniable.
The History Of The SPARC processor « UNIX
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