The SPARC architecture was heavily influenced by the earlier RISC designs, including the RISC I and II from the University of California, Berkeley and the IBM 801. These original RISC designs were minimalist, … See more

There have been three major revisions of the architecture. The first published version was the 32-bit SPARC Version 7 (V7) in 1986. SPARC Version 8 (V8), an enhanced SPARC architecture definition, was released in 1990. The main differences between … See more

SPARC machines have generally used Sun's SunOS, Solaris, or OpenSolaris including derivatives illumos and OpenIndiana, but other operating systems have also been used, such as NeXTSTEP, RTEMS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Linux See more

For HPC loads Fujitsu builds specialized SPARC64 fx processors with a new instruction extensions set, called HPC-ACE (High … See more

SPARC is a load/store architecture (also known as a register-register architecture); except for the load/store instructions used to access memory, all instructions operate on the registers, in … See more

The following organizations have licensed the SPARC architecture:
• Afara Websystems
• Bipolar Integrated Technology (BIT) See more

Several fully open source implementations of the SPARC architecture exist:
• LEON, a 32-bit radiation-tolerant, SPARC V8 implementation, designed especially for space use. See more