As I work on
↫ Daniel Mangummossand research modern processor design patterns and techniques, I am also looking for patterns and techniques from the past that, for one reason or another, have not persisted into our modern machines. While on a run this week, I was listening to an old Oxide and Friends episode where Bryan, Adam, and crew were reminiscing on the SPARC instruction set architecture (ISA). SPARC is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems, with the first machine, the SPARCstation1 (a.k.a. Sun 4/60, a.k.a Campus), being delivered in 1987. It was heavily influenced by the early RISC designs from David Patterson and team at Berkeley in the 1970s and 1980s, which is the same lineage from which RISC-V has evolved. Given the decision to basemosson the RISC-VRV64IISA, I was interested to learn more about the history and finer details of SPARC.
The sad thing is that SPARC is pretty close to dead at this point, with the two major players in the high-end – Oracle and Fujitsu – throwing in the towel half a decade ago. There’s some lower-end work, such as the LEON chips, but those efforts, too, seem to be going nowhere at the moment. Definitely sad, since I’ve always been oddly obsessed with the architecture, and hope to still somehow get my hands on the last UltraSPARC workstation ever built (the Sun Ultra 45, which is, sadly, incredibly expensive on the used market). There’s also a whole boatload of servers on the used market with fancier, newer SPARC processors, but as far as I know, none of those support any form of even barely usable graphics, making them useless for weird people like me who want to run a desktop on them.
Ooo, for the first time in months I’m allowed to log on to OSnews.
> as far as I know, none of those support any form of even barely usable graphics, making them useless for weird people like me who want to run a desktop on them.
Assuming you want to run Solaris, the thing to note is the desktop wasn’t designed to take advantage of accelerated graphics anyway. Think about it in modern terms: the top of the line GPU is not going to improve your desktop experience; it requires software designed to drive it. The same is true transposing 20 years into the past. Back in that era, things like web browsers did not have GPU offload – the benefit of a good GPU is its ability to offload X server primitives.
What a good GPU would do is support OpenGL, and allow you to port Quake 3 to Solaris.
In all honesty, the way to have a good desktop experience on a SPARC Solaris machine is to run the X server on a different device. I’m saying that because back when I owned a few, it was faster to render a web browser across a LAN than to render it on the local CPU/framebuffer. That’s partly because of the GPU, but mainly the CPU, because any CPU work performed in the X server is moved to a much faster Intel device. If you do that, no graphics are required on the Solaris machine, and the server products work fine (this is one of the things they were designed for.)
The big problem with them is noise. The servers are louder than the desktops, but the desktops could still be very loud. If you wanted a usable desktop, I’d try to figure out how to get an SSD to replace the disks. The Ultra 45 could ship with 15k RPM SAS drives, and they are loud.
Isn’t SPARC open and royalty-free? I’m surprised countries like China or Russia didn’t attempt to use it for their home-grown processors. I know China has LoongArch, a fork of MIPS (which itself is also dead). And Russia tried with Elbrus2000 (e2k ISA) but that apparently went nowhere, especially now with the sanctions and their lack of modern chip fabs.
SPARC is open and Royalty free… there is/was also an official licensing thing you could join cheaply when sun was operating and they’d send you compliance test information and such.
That said… the ISA itself is dated, and doesn’t really have the backwards compatibility draw that x86 due to old Sparc software being almost 100% proprietary with node locked or networked licensed stuff. So, it ends up being there is almost no reason to run vintage Sparc software even though you can. Since that is the case… ARM pushed it out of the RISC server space, RISC-V is pushing it out of its embedded space niche.
NOP bubbles and the register windows are pretty much universally seen as quaint and are the nails main nails in the coffin of Sparc ISA.
>SPARC processors, but as far as I know, none of those support any form of even barely usable graphics, making them useless for weird people like me who want to run a desktop on them.
It is my understanding that newer sparc systems should be able to run radeon graphics cards on Linux and maybe some of the OpenIndiana forks at this point especially oldish cards. So you should be able to run a desktop environment on a T4 or similar for example. In theory, nobody does in practice though because it is not a road well traveled.