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Sun Microsystems SuperSPARC
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The Sun SuperSPARC Processor
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The Texas Instruments made Sun SuperSPARC CPU, introduced in 1992, is a SPARC V8 (32-bit) compliant RISC CPU that was used for Sun's SPARCstation 20/xx workstations and some servers during early to mid-1990s. It has an on-chip 20k 5-way set-associative instruction cache (which is very uncommon) plus an on-chip 16k 4-way set-associative data cache and runs at up to 60MHz.
The SuperSPARC was intended for use in a broad range of applications from uniprocessor desktop machines to large multiprocessor servers, built with the SuperSPARC processor either in direct MBus mode or in VBus mode with the use of an external cache controller. An external cache controller supports multiprocessor configurations using either MBus or XBus interfaces with up to 2 MB of secondary cache.
The SuperSPARC was the first CPU to feature superscaling, or the ability to process multiple instructions in a single clock cycle via multiple execution units.
For rendering Pixar's "Toy Story", the first full length movie to be created only by computers, Pixar used more than 100 Sun SPARCstation 20 workstations and a SPARCserver 1000 to render the whole film. They all had TMS390 SuperSPARC processors.
References:
SuperSPARC Data Sheet |
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