History of SPARC systems 1987 to 2010

In the beginning...

It has to be said that in 1987 when Sun introduced the first SPARC based computer, it certainly wasn't clear that SPARC was going to become the leading hardware platform for serious server applications. At that time most computer manufacturers were talking about introducing their own RISC based computers. The few which have survived as the engines of today's Unix derived computers are:- SPARC, HP's Precision Architrecture, and Silicon Graphics MIPS. Some others continued as graphics or floating point accelerators:- such as the transputer, and Intel's 860, and 960 RISC processors. IBM's original PC-RT was abandoned and replaced several years later with the much more successful PowerPC chip family. DEC's Alpha family also started much later. Many others vanished without trace once SPARC became successful.

In 1987 Sun had already achieved a leading position in the Unix workstation market with its two product lines based on Motorola 68020, and Intel 386 processor technology. The 386i was positioned as a lower cost, lower performance workstation compared to the Motorola based Sun-3 family. The 386i's DOS emulation and ease of use feature were calculated to entice users who might be intimidated by the cold shell of a pure Unix machine. In fact, within a few years, Sun was to drop both Intel and Motorola platforms and migrate its entire customer base to SPARC.

why did Sun and most other minicomputer oem's turn to RISC?

The market developments which encouraged all minicomputer oem's to look at a RISC strategy at that time were:-

• designing their own RISC architectures offered minicomputer oem's the attraction of breaking away from a dependence on the two main manufacturers of microprocessor chips at the time (Intel and Motorola). Systems vendors hoped to differentiate their products, which was difficult to do when they all used the same processor chips. In 1986 over 90% of PC's used Intel chips, and over 90% of workstations used Motorola chips. Today it's still true that over 90% of PC's use Intel architecture chips, but the largest proportion of Unix derived RISC systems actually runs on SPARC.

• the relatively low cost accessibility to semiconductor fabrication using gate arrays. Chip manufacturers who needed high volumes to recoup their capital investments of hundreds of millions of dollars (now billions) had figured out a way of producing standard product families of chips called gate arrays, which were identical except for the last few steps of the production process which defined the interconnections. This enabled computer systems companies to buy state of the art fabrication by effectively buying batches of wafers on a time-share basis from a few thousand dollars upwards, instead of the millions of dollars required previously .

• the deskilling of the chip design process by sophisticated computer aided design (CAD) tools enabled computer systems designers to design, test and simulate most of the design stages at their workstations, without needing knowledge of the underlying manufacturing process parameters. The software enabled designers to work at a logic function-block level without having to worry too much about the realities of interconnections, datapaths and process variations. This revolution in hardware logic design was akin to the invention of high level programming languages which enabled programmers to write their applications in terms of the problem, rather than needing to know exactly how the computer was built or wired together.
  
  ...Later:- November 2010 - Sun Micro was LSI Logic's smartest ASIC customer - according to one comment in LSI's 30th anniversary article.

• the computer market had grown weary of the high costs of applications obsolescence, as one generation of computer hardware and software replaced another. Learning from the rapid technology changes in the early days of the Intel architecture PC market, users were starting to appreciate that open systems standards which were supported by many manufacturers helped increase choice and performance while at the same time keeping a lid on costs. In the multi-user application area, only one operating system - Unix - seemed to offer a safe choice. The proprietary alternatives from market leaders DEC and IBM, were very capable, but had a higher entry cost. For vendors, the simplicity of licensing and porting Unix onto their own hardware gave many small computer companies the ability to offer serious competitive alternatives to the low and mid range computers being sold by their much larger competitors on proprietary platforms.

The SPARC Product Directory has traced many of the historical developments in this market. Here are some of the highlights. See dates below.

1996 perspective

At the end of 1996, we observe that the SPARC systems market has grown seriously large. The 1996/97 edition of the SPARC Product Directory contained nearly twice as many pages, more than four times as many products, and twice as many suppliers as our first edition. All the indicators we see suggest that this growth in the SPARC market will continue.

The availability of two competing 64 bit CPU SPARC chip sets (UltraSPARC from Sun Microelectronics, and SPARC64 from Fujitsu owned HAL Computer) clearly demonstrates that SPARC has reached a market size which will continue to attract competitive products even at the cutting edge of technology and performance for another decade.

SPARC is more than just an "Open" architecture. SPARC is a good place to look for anyone looking beyond the performance envelope of a desktop PC. The breadth of performance covers the full spectrum from portables to supercomputers. The range of hardware interfaces and connectivity options is unsurpassed. The applications experience represented by over 12,000 Solaris applications packages and the largest installed base of multi-processor servers makes SPARC the safe choice for your seriously complex computing application. Sun's policy of licensing technology and encouraging other oem's to use Sun developed interfaces means there's always a competitive choice for your next SPARC project.

Dates - 1987 to 1999 - key SPARC market milestones

The chronology below lists some of the significant events in the first decade of SPARC systems. With a pool of thousands of subjects we could have chosen from, we apologize to anyone involved with products or events we've left out. If you would like to nominate your own products, please send an email to ACSL subject: SPARC history, and we'll consider adding them in, or creating an alternative reader inspired history page.

1987. Sun introduced the the first SPARC based computer the Sun-4. This was a VME bus based machine and was packaged in the same enclosure as Sun's top of the line Motorola based Sun-3 servers.
      

1988. Sun started the Florida SunFlash, an email newsletter to keep partners, customers and internal Sun personnel up to date with the rapid stream of Sun's new products.
      

1989. Sun, with other partners set up SPARC International, Inc as the industry body to disseminate technical information about SPARC, and facilitate the licensing of technology and trademarks.
      Sun introduced the SPARCstation 1, rated at 12.5 MIPS, 1.4 MFLOPS, about 3 times faster than the Sun-3 model it replaced. This blew away all other competition on the desktop, because most competitors were still waiting to get volume quantities of Motorola's 68040 chip, to replace their 68030 models. In fact the 68040 took a long time in coming, which forced many workstation oem's to ship older models with the promise of a future upgrade. The SPARCstation 1 was the first computer to include an SBus interface.
      

      December 6, 1989, Antares Microsystems announced the industry's first 3rd party SBus cards. These were:- the 10Base-2 Ethernet Controller, the SCSI-SNS Host Adapter, the Parallel Port, and the 8-Channel Serial Controller.

1990. Sun introduced the SPARCstation 2, rated at 28.5 MIPS, 4.2 MFLOPS.

1991. Sun introduced the SPARCserver 600MP. This was Sun's first multiprocessor machine, and was the last generation of computers from Sun to include the VMEbus. However, each processor card also included 4 x SBus slots. The 600MP processors ran at the same speed as the SPARCstation 2, but underlying the design was the new MBus architecture, which enabled field upgrades to faster CPU's, when these became available in subsequent years.

1992. Sun introduced the SPARCstation 10.. This was Sun's first desktop multiprocessor machine, capable of having 1 to 4 CPU's.

      Tadpole Technology introduced the SPARCbook 1. The first true SPARC portable running Sun-OS.

      An indication of how the SPARC compatible market had grown by this time, is that the first edition of ACSL's SBus Product Directory included details of over 75 oem's making SPARC computers and SBus cards, and over 300 products.

      At the end of 1992, Sun launched the SPARCcenter 2,000 a 20 CPU capable datacenter server which remained Sun's flagship until 1996.

1993. Cray Research launched the SuperServer 6400. A datacenter server with 64 x CPU capability.

      ICL previewed its GoldRush Megaserver, also a 64 CPU capable server, originally rated at 6,000 transactions/second.

      Chip manufacturer Weitek (now part of Rockwell) introduced the SPARC power microP, a user installable CPU upgrade with clock doubling technology aimed at customers of SPARCstation 2's, and IPX's. These competed directly with Sun's own board swap upgrade program, and showed that the installed base of SPARC computers had reached a critical mass.

1994. ICL did the largest ever rollout of new SPARC server products, with its teamserver and superserver product lines, with integral RAID capability, with every model rated in transactions/second.

      Integrated Micro Products (IMP) launched the FT-SPARC the first SPARC computer to be designed from the chips upwards as a genuinely fault tolerant architecture.

      Sun replaced the SPARCstation 10 family with the similar, but higher performance SPARCstation 20.

      Ross Technology announced hyperSPARC CPU's as user installable competitive upgrades to earlier MBus machines from Sun. In later years, hyperSPARC and Sun's own superSPARC competed for MBus slots in the factory as well as the installed base. Later that year, Sun started to include hyperSPARC models as alternative choices in its SS-20 family.

1995. Fujitsu owned HAL Computer launched the industry's first workstations based on a 64 bit CPU, HAL's own SPARC64.

      Shortly after HAL's announcement, Sun finally launched the long expected Ultra 1, and 2 workstations which used Sun's 64 bit UltraSPARC processor.
      
      From the 1995 edition of the SPARC Product Directory...
      
      Launched in Q4 95, the Ultra 1 and 2 were the start of a new generation of SPARC based workstations and servers from Sun Microsystems. These models are positioned as high performance workstations, with intrinsic memory and processor performance above the SPARCstation 20 class, which has been discontinued by Sun.
      
      The most obvious architectural feature is that the Ultra range uses the 64 bit UltraSPARC processor. The wider databus provides intrinsically faster performance than a 32 bit CPU at the same clock speed, but Sun has optimised the performance of the dataflows in the CPU to extract significant performance gains compared to previous SuperSPARC and HyperSPARC implementations. Additionally, the new visual instruction set (VIS) includes hardware for visual manipulation which was previously only available on external boards. Building these features into the CPU supports very high levels of graphics performance. There is no MBus in the Ultra machines. Processors, I/O and RAM connect via a crossbar switched interconnect which Sun calls UltraSPARC Port Architecture (UPA). SBus has been retained as the I/O expansion interface in these models. As with previous Sun models, there's room in the basic system design to support faster processors (up to and beyond 300MHz).
      
      Ultra 1 model 140 model 170 - Single processor workstations with 64 bit UltraSPARC CPU. Model 140, 143MHz CPU, delivers 215 SPECint_92, and 303 SPECfp_92. Model 170, 167MHz CPU, delivers 252 SPECint_92, 351 SPECfp_92. RAM 8 SIMM sockets provide up to 512M. Graphics options:- in addition to the usual SBus graphics available on previous Sun models, the Ultra 1 is supported by a new family of Creator, or Creator3D systems connected via the UPA. New 3D RAM technology delivers upto 600M pixel operations/second.
      
      Interfaces:- UPA (crossbar on motherboard), SBus (32/64 bit 60M bytes/sec), SCSI-2 (10M bytes/sec basic models, 20M bytes/sec FastWide on Creator models). Ethernet (10-BaseT for models 140, 170), (10-BaseT and 100-BaseT for 170E Creator models). Parallel - Centronics compatible port DB25 connectors. Serial I/O 2 x RS-232/RS423 with DB25. Audio 16 bit 8KHz to 48KHz, internal speaker, external mike. Keyboard/mouse interface Sun 5, AT 101, or Unix. Internal drive options:- 3.5" floppy, quad speed 644M Sun CD-ROM. Tape:- optional 4G or 8G DDS2 4mm, or 14G 8mm. Winchesters:- up to 2 x 3.5" x 1" (1G or 2G), or 1 x 3.5" x 1.6" (4.2G). (3 SBus slots) Operating system - Solaris 2.5 or later.
      
      Ultra 2 - Multiprocessor workstations with 64 bit UltraSPARC CPU. Upto 2 x CPU's per system. Other features and interfaces as per the faster options for the Ultra 1, 170E above. (4 SBus slots )
      
      IDG Launched SunWorld Online - the world's first independent Sun publication on the web.
      
      (The 1995 market review text below is unchanged from the SPARC Product Directory published at that time.)
      
      Market Developments in 1995 - Q1 announcements
      
      Sun Microsystems launched two desktop models that redefined the entry level for SPARC based computers. The SPARCstation 4, which replaced the SPARCclassic as Sun's lowest price entry level desktop workstation, and the SPARC Xterminal 1 which replaced the SPARCclassic X as Sun's lowest price desktop terminal. It's likely you would only use the SPARC Xterminal 1 if you already have SPARC servers running Solaris. But at a launch price $1,600 below the entry level workstation, it's a serious contender for sensitive budgets.
      
      In the past, X terminal customers who didn't need the high graphics performance of CAD applications tended to go elsewhere for their desktop terminal needs e.g. to HP, NCD or Tektronix. But as more SPARC servers are deployed in commercial database applications, Sun can't ignore the business potential of large numbers of terminal seats. The cost engineered features in this model (i.e. it doesn't have the fastest processor from the SS-4 because most people don't need it) show that Sun is taking this segment of its market more seriously, and would like to get more of this kind of business.
      
      General Imaging launched its Texas Instruments based TMS 320C80 SBus Co-processor card. The S/IP80 card is designed for signal/image processing applications. The TMS 320C80 is a single chip which includes 4 x 32 bit DSP parallel processors running at 25MHz delivering up to 1 Billion operations per second. If that wasn't quite enough, the card also includes an on-board video digitizer. Multiple cards can be run as part of a software coherent system that scales up to 30 billion operations per second.
      
      Market Developments in 1995 - Q2 announcements
      
      The main event in this quarter was the SunWorld exhibition in San Francisco. The trends seen in the products exhibited were evolutionary rather than revolutionary. More vendors are now positioning their products for telecomms or Internet use. Most vendors now have something to say about how their products can address the needs for High Availability applications, although there are still very few vendors who have complete solutions in this area.
      
      Data/Ware launched the DW3300, an SBus to IBM Channel Interface. This emulates an IBM 3088 adapter and enables an IBM mainframe running the MVS operating system to transfer files and jobs to an attached SPARC host. Although file transfers can operate in either direction, it's likely that the main use of such a product will be to offload CPU intensive tasks from the mainframe. However, there are also many organizations which still use their IBM mainframes as the main repository for corporate data, and in those cases the transfers may go the other way.
      
      Market Developments in 1995 - Q3 announcements
      
      The summer can be a quiet time for new product announcements, although this year witnessed the biggest computer market launch ever, in the shape of Microsoft's Windows 95 rollout. It's possible that most other computer vendors wisely avoided doing anything in this time frame because they would have found it hard to attract much attention in the glare of Microsoft's publicity.
      
      Two announcements in the media world this quarter had special significance to Sun users, the launch of SunFlash (aka FlashBack) as an independent newsletter, and the launch on the world wide web of SunWorldOnLine. Apart from the issue of timing, and the common theme of Sun related news, the publications also share an editor, inasmuch as John J. McLaughlin the editor of Flashback is also the new products editor for SunWorldOnLine.
      
      The first of these announcements concerned changes in the structure of the Internet based email newsletter called "SunFlash" (there's also another variant called "FlashBack"). SunFlash had been running for over 6 years as an in-house communications organ of Sun Microsystems. During the summer, it became an independent commercially run news service, although its editor John J. McLaughlin, remains at the helm.
      
      The main effect for the 140,000+ people who receive this newsletter is that independence from Sun will help to broaden out the coverage of products and news, although it's reasonable to assume that most of the material will still have a core based around Sun, Solaris or SPARC. If you don't get this news service, you can get general information on how to subscribe by sending an email to:
      
      Flashback@FlashBack.COM with 9001 in the Subject line.
      
      The second media announcement was the launch of a magazine called SunWorld Online on the world wide web. You can see this magazine for yourself on: http://www.sun.com/sunworldonline
      
      This new magazine is published by International Data Group (IDG), and it's edited by much of the same team which produced Advanced Systems. The latter is no longer available as a printed magazine. To quote from their own press release...
      
      ..."SunWorld Online is heir to a line of print publications dating back to 1988, when a renegade marketing group at Sun founded the quarterly Sun Tech Journal. Sold to IDG in 1990, it became SunWorld, a monthly magazine with a circulation of 72,000 plus editions in Japan and Great Britain. In 1994 the name changed to Advanced Systems in order to broaden its subscription base to 90,000 Unix readers. This May the decision was made to become the first major computer magazine to go completely digital."
      
      We wish both these new titles good luck, and hope that you'll get a chance to have a look at them.
      
      ...Later:- 5 years later - December 19, 2000 - SunWorld Online relaunched as UNIX Insider to reflect changing industry trends. "UNIX has not been `just Solaris' for many years," said UNIX Insider Executive Editor Joe Franklin in a letter to readers.
      
      Market Developments in 1995 - Q4 announcements
      
      The quarter hadn't started as we went to press, but there's no doubt that the most significant launch for users of SPARC systems will be the new UltraSPARC based servers from Sun Microsystems. The UltraSPARC processor is a 64 bit CPU and ushers in the start of a new decade for SPARC systems. (The first SPARC systems were shipped by Sun in 1987). Doubling the datapath from 32 to 64 bits would normally provide a potential doubling of performance (other factors being equal) but as reported in earlier editions of this directory, the SPARC Technology Business (STB) division of Sun has introduced intrinsic architectural support for multi-media applications in addition to speeding up the pre-existing processor cores. When the first systems ship, they will run existing 32 bit Solaris application binaries from 3 to 6 times faster than current SuperSPARC systems.
      
      As you'd expect from any new processor, applications which are bounded by the performance of a single processor will run a lot faster. But another benefit, is that the new processors can address large physical RAM more efficiently, so that Solaris users who have large databases (over 4G) or other large data sets can look forward to a speed-up in running their applications and can stop looking at competing products such as Digital Equipment's Alpha. Two general factors of interest to current users, which may get lost in the hype when the new UltraSPARC systems are launched.
      
      1 - The I/O interface supported is SBus. (This is deduced from the chip-set which accompanies the UltraSPARC. ) The consequence is that SBus will remain a significant expansion technology for SPARC based systems for some years still to come.
      
      2 - The memory bandwidth of the first generation UltraSPARC is already close to the maximum limit of the MBus, and any MBus based implementation of this 64 bit processor would throw away most of the potential performance gains. Therefore users shouldn't expect to see MBus based enhancements to their existing systems (anytime soon) as they have already seen with the HyperSPARC generation of upgrade products. However, upgrades may still be expected in the traditional form of board or system level swaps.
      
      The fact that UltraSPARC machines will need to be new designs rather than modified MBus designs also means that there may be a delay before most other vendors get their new 64 bit SPARC products to market.
      
      STB has affirmed that some of the features which contribute to the high performance of the 64 bit UltraSPARC (which is a 4 way superscaler design) will trickle down to a future generation of low cost microSPARC III based products. So whatever the performance level of your current SPARC systems, all users will eventually benefit from the performance and increased market confidence that arise from this launch. You'll also be able to hang on to your investments in SBus cards and related software and reuse them in a new generation of faster systems.
      
      Retrospective... In fact Fujitsu owned HAL Computer, was the first company to launch a 64 bit SPARC based computer, based on their own developed SPARC64 processor. The HALstations were announced less than a month before Sun's Ultra 1 and 2.

1996. Sun acquired IMP. The Sun-IMP business unit is expected to transfer its fault-tolerant technologies within Sun's product range, and continue its strong penetration in the telecoms market.

      Sun acquired the SPARC business of Cray Systems, from its new owner Silicon Graphics. These included the products, technolgies and customer base associated with the SuperServer 6400 family.

      Sun launched its family of Ultra Enterprise servers which included configurations upto 30 x 64 bit CPU's, and 30 x SBus channels. These Sun models, with an internal Gigaplane I/O bandwidth of 2.5 Gigabytes/second, set new standards of leadership for Unix datacenter servers.

      Sun launched the JavaStation. A microSPARC based Network Computer, at a price point below $1,000

      Sun Microelectronics launched the SPARCengine Ultra AX. This was an UltraSPARC based motherboard running Solaris with PCI-bus expansion, instead of the usual SBus. This was the first time that the industry standard PCI-bus, from the Intel PC world, appeared in a production SPARC based computer.
      
      (The 1996 market review text below is unchanged from the SPARC Product Directory published at that time.)
      
      Market Developments in 1996 - Q1 announcements
      
      In this period Sun came to the attention of a wider audience than usual as a result of its reported attempt to purchase Apple Computer. If you ignored the inevitable speculation about why Sun would want to buy Apple, the real reasons for which is only known to a handful of people, you would still be left with the conclusion that Sun Microsystems is now a large enough company and has sufficient financial muscle to seriously contemplate acquiring any one of a whole bunch of household names in the computer market if it really wanted to. Although Sun is very well known in the server market, and millions of computer users are connected via SPARC machines somewhere in their workplace, this was the first time that many non technical people in the wider PC market became aware of Sun as a significant player.
      
      As we went to press, Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI) was making moves to purchase Cray Research. Cray Research manufactures the "big brother" of Sun's SPARCcenter 2000E, and this move would provide a useful extension to SGI's product line. It's likely that SGI would be able to sell more of these high end machines than Cray Research because it has a larger installed base, and it's easier to work upwards than sell a point product at the top of the performance range.
      
      SPARC Technology Business, the division of Sun Microsystems which develops new processors and markets technology at chip and board level to other OEM's changed its name to Sun Microelectronics. The "Sun" brand is more appropriate as this business now includes the marketing of Java chipsets which are more strongly associated with Sun as a software standards developer.
      
      SPARC workstation competitors Tatung Science and Technology Inc, and Axil Computer both announced the availability of new workstations which incorporate the 64 bit UltraSPARC processors from Sun Microelectronics. Tatung customers can upgrade their COMPserver 20 products by replacing the processor board. The Axil Ultima 1 family is shipping with Solaris 2.5.
      
      While we're on the subject of go-faster hardware, this edition of the directory includes a new contender for the title of fastest SBus disk interface. Meltek Data's SBus Fibre Array controller claims 106M bytes/second channel rate. More than just a fast RAID, the Fibre Array, also from Meltek supports multi-host connectivity, and potentially up to 450G bytes of fault tolerant disk storage.
      
      This quarter also saw a few cosmetic changes in this publication, with the name change from the "SBus Product Directory" to the "SPARC Product Directory." We also introduced a format change, so that instead of printing different editions of the directory in Europe and the USA, at slightly different intervals we've now got one edition, one cover and one paper size. That's progress...
      
      Also in February 1996 - Sun's merger talks with Apple ended.

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