Architectures
The instruction sets the lab speaks. One page per family: what it is, where it came from, and which architectures belong to it.
- SPARC Sun Microsystems' RISC architecture, introduced in 1987 and 64-bit since the V9 specification. Oracle and Fujitsu built its last server generations; Solaris is its native operating system.
- POWER and PowerPC IBM's RISC lineage. POWER built servers and supercomputers; PowerPC, its 1991 offshoot with Apple and Motorola, spent a decade in every Macintosh and lives on in embedded systems.
- RISC-V An open, royalty-free instruction set from UC Berkeley, published in the 2010s. Anyone may implement it, and everyone does — from fifty-cent microcontrollers to server-class processors.
- MIPS One of the first commercial RISC architectures, out of Stanford in the mid-eighties. It powered SGI workstations and nineties game consoles, and survives mostly in networking silicon.
- Arm The most widely shipped instruction set there is, from Acorn roots in 1980s Cambridge. arm64 is its 64-bit architecture — phones, single-board computers, Apple silicon, and a growing share of servers.
- x86-64 AMD's 64-bit extension of Intel's x86, first shipped in 2003 and since then the default architecture of desktops, laptops, and servers.
- Xtensa Tensilica's configurable embedded architecture, best known as the core inside Espressif's ESP32 Wi-Fi microcontrollers.
- FPGA Not an instruction set at all: programmable logic you configure into whatever hardware you need — including processors that never shipped as silicon.