SPARC Assembly/SPARC Architecture
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[edit] SPARC History
SPARC (from Scalable Processor Architecture) was developed by Sun Microsystems introduced in 1986. SPARC is a registered trademark of SPARC International, Inc., an organization established in 1989 to promote the SPARC architecture and to provide conformance testing. Implementations of the original 32-bit SPARC architecture were initially designed and used for Sun's Sun-4 workstation and server systems, replacing their earlier Sun-3 systems based on the Motorola 68000 family of processors. Later, SPARC processors were used in SMP servers produced by Sun Microsystems, Solbourne and Fujitsu, among others and designed for 64-bit operation. SPARC International was intended to open the SPARC architecture to make a larger ecosystem for the design, which has been licensed to several manufacturers, including Texas Instruments, Atmel, Cypress Semiconductor, and Fujitsu. As a result of SPARC International, the SPARC architecture is fully open and non-proprietary.
[edit] SPARC Architecture
The SPARC is a RISC architecture, which stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computing. The theory is that having the bare minimum of instructions needed to complete a job, the resulting architecture is faster, as most instructions take only one clock cycle to decode, leading to rapid execution. This is in contrast to CISC machines, which have specialized variable length instructions, and can take multiple clock cycles to decode and execute.
The SPARC architecture also prefetches instructions, having the next instruction fetched while the current one is executed. This has implication for branch instructions, as the next instruction might not be executed if the branch is taken, and this must be dealt with accordingly.
[edit] Why SPARC?
Being a RISC architecture, SPARC assembly is very clean and simple, while still being powerful. This makes it easy to learn, and a good choice before learning more complicated assembly languages if needed. Furthermore, it provides a closer look of what is going on "under the hood" of higher-level programing languages, and at the very least should foster an appreciation of the large amount of work being done by compilers when compiling such languages. If you don't have a SPARC computer, you can use a SPARC emulator.
