SUN ULTRASPARC.(implementations of SPARC V9 scalable-processor architecture)

EDN, September, 1999

UltraSPARC-I, -II, and -III are silicon implementations of SPARC V9, a version of the scalable-processor architecture. SPARC V9 maintains upward binary compatibility with SPARC V8 and extends the architecture with support for 64-bit virtual addresses and integer data as large as 64 bits; 32 double-precision, floating-point registers (up from 16); and speculative loads, which don't take a fault if accessing an out-of-range variable. V9 also defines a hardware mechanism that uses compiler technologies that streamline the prefetching of data and instructions.

The UltraSPARC-I and -II superscalar processors have nine-stage pipelines in which the first two stages comprise the instruction fetch and decode. Sun adds three stages to the integer pipe to make it...

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