The Scalable processor Architecture is the widely used by the Solaris operating system.There are three versions v7 and v8 which are 32-bit and V9 which is 64-bit. The SPARC v9 processors can run 32-bit applications as well.
The SPARC processor has 32 general-purpose registers.
The SPARC architecture is big-endian in nature which means that the integers and pointers are represented in memory with the most significant byte first.
Operating system support
SPARC machines have generally used Sun’s SunOS or Solaris Operating Systems, but other operating systems such as NEXTSTEP, RTEMS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and GNU/Linux are also used on SPARC-based systems.
In 1993, Intergraph announced a port of Windows NT to the SPARC architecture but it was later canceled.
Open source implementations
Two fully open source implementations of the SPARC architecture exist.
* LEON is a 32-bit, single-thread SPARC Version 8 implementation, designed with a view to space applications. Source code is written in VHDL, and licensed under the GPL.
* OpenSPARC T1 is a 64-bit, 32-thread implementation conforming to the UltraSPARC Architecture 2005 and to SPARC Version 9. Source code is written in Verilog, and licensed under many licenses. Most OpenSPARC T1 source code is licensed under the GPL. Source based on extant open source projects will continue to be licensed under their current licenses. Binary programs are licensed under a binary Software License Agreement.
