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Sun Microsystems UltraSPARC
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The Sun UltraSPARC Processor
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The UltraSPARC, introduced in late 1994 and available in 1995, was Sun's first general-purpose processor to deliver SPARC V9 compliant 64-bit compute power with advanced graphics throughput and real-time video performance. Along with 64-bit data and addressing, the UltraSPARC had the potential to execute as many as four RISC instructions per clock cycle and featured a built-in graphics processing unit. It also added a special set of VIS (Visual Instruction Set) instructions for accelerating media and graphics applications. The UltraSPARC supports 2D as well as 3D graphics, image processing, real-time video compression and decompression with no additional hardware support. Many of these optimized graphics instructions execute complex graphics operations in a single clock cycle.
The 64-bit core of the first UltraSPARC is essentially the same as that of all subsequent
UltraSPARC chips. UltraSPARC II (shipped in 1997) provided better multiprocessing
support and the UltraSPARC III (shipped in 2001) integrated more cache memory,
but performance improvements have largely derived from clock speed increases.
References:
SPARC at Wikipedia
UltraSPARC introduction
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