Celebrating 25 Years of SPARC

About 3 decades ago, a small team of engineers at a small firm bet big on developing a new microprocessor architecture that would go on to successfully challenge the dominance of the big players of that time. The Scalable Processor ARChitecture or SPARC that the team developed was based on RISC and made the market debut 25 years ago.

The feat of this team was remarkable because it went beyond developing just the microprocessor. To get the highest performance from their chip, it created its own operating system (OS), then called Solaris. The SPARC and Solaris combination redefined the graphics workstation and enterprise computing performance with better scalability and availability than what the competition had to offer. But it was the complete integration of software and hardware that would become so important, first to Sun, and later to Oracle after it acquired Sun in 2010.

Sun-4 heralded the beginning of a new age of high-performance IT infrastructure. SPARC successfully challenged the dominance of mainframes by delivering performance that was orders of magnitude ahead of the competing platforms. In no time, SPARC became a significant business for Sun.

Facing the Challenges

Like all great journeys, the beginning of SPARC was not without its challenges. The team faced considerable internal resistance to the idea of an original architecture when there were many chipsets available in the market. They had never designed a chip before, and now with SPARC they were trying to design a microprocessor, one of the most complex pieces of silicon. The engineers however believed in themselves and started their own offshoot company. After the idea was validated and progress was shown, the offshoot company was quickly reacquired by Sun.

The combination of SPARC with Oracle Solaris was also a bold step in complete integration of software and hardware that is the distinguishing feature of Oracle's strategy today. Full-stack integration is an essential part of any SPARC system, and these are known to be the industry's most reliable, scalable, and secure systems for mission-critical enterprise applications and cloud.

Oracle acquired Sun in 2010, and since that time Oracle's hardware and software engineers have worked side-by-side to build fully integrated systems and optimized solutions. After the acquisition, Oracle has been committed to deliver new SPARC processors and server hardware every 12 to 18 months. Oracle is now driving the innovation with a $5 bn a year spend on research and development and has delivered more than what was promised on the SPARC and Oracle Solaris roadmap.

In addition to performance and adoption milestones, the SPARC platform has a history of introducing improvements in other areas important to enterprises, including data security.

A New Roadmap

A new roadmap for SPARC was announced in 2010 and over a 5-year period, it calls for improvement of 4 times the cores, 32 times the threads, 16 times the memory capacity, 40 times the database transactions, and 10 times the Java operations per second.

Going forward, the SPARC roadmap includes new T and M-Series servers that are expected to deliver significant throughput advancements over the current-generation models. In fact, Oracle wants the performance to double every time a new product is released. For a 25-year-old product that continues to lead the industry in many matrices, kudos must go to the brilliance of the team that fought against the odds and brought the first SPARC to the world.