Dale Greenley

UltraSPARC-I

The next generation UltraSPARC-I CPU represents a significant step forward in processor performance at the cost of increased design complexity. Added complexity increases the risks in achieving functionally correct first silicon. Existing design verification techniques were supplemented by applying emulation to obtain an early look at functionality. Discussed are the goals, methods and results of the UltraSPARC-I emulation.

UltraSPARC: compiling for maximum floating-point performance

UltraSPARC-I is the first microprocessor from Sun Microsystems to implement the new 64-bit SPARC V9 architecture. UltraSPARC-I is a superscalar processor capable of issuing up to four instructions together and possesses several features designed to enable high performance on a variety of applications. While UltraSPARC-I maintains strict binary compatibility with and delivers excellent performance on thousands of existing 32-bit applications developed for other SPARC processors, even more benefit can be derived by using a compiler that specifically targets it. This paper discusses various features of UltraSPARC-I and the compiler techniques used to leverage them to obtain high performance on many floating point programs.