SPARC
SPARC — Scalable Processor Architecture — came out of Sun Microsystems in 1987, drawing on the Berkeley RISC research of the early eighties. Sun published it as an open specification through SPARC International, so others could and did build compatible processors; Fujitsu’s SPARC64 line is the one that lasted. Oracle inherited Sun’s half of the platform in 2010. It is a big-endian architecture, and Solaris is the operating system it was built alongside, though the BSDs and Linux have run on it for decades.
Since 2022 Oracle has licensed Solaris 11.4 for personal, non-production use — on SPARC it requires a T4-or-later or a Fujitsu SPARC processor, which makes the M10 generation about the newest hardware a hobbyist can run current Solaris on.
In this family
sparc64— the 64-bit line, defined by the SPARC V9 specification (1993). Everything SPARC in this lab speaks it. The 32-bit V7 and V8 generations preceded it.
In the lab
- Fujitsu SPARC M10-1 A SPARC64 X server.