Trends in building a SPARC compatible system: a case study in methods and tools

Author

Afshar, P.

Author_Institution

Solarix Syst., Fremont, CA, USA

fYear

1991

fDate

Feb. 25 1991-March 1 1991

Firstpage

37

Lastpage

41

Abstract

An attempt was made to build a SPARC-based system with more features and higher performance than the existing SPARC system at a competitive price. The Solarix/4 Personal Workstation Plus, (PW+), which initially offered 18 MIPS at 25 MHz, was augmented by a floating point unit, delivering more than 3 MFLOPS and 64 kbyte of cache. With eight SIMM slots on the motherboard, RAM can be expanded to 32 Mbyte using standard 4-Mbyte SIMM modules. 128 Mbyte of RAM can be supported, using high-density 16 Mbyte SIMM modules. The architecture of the Solarix/4 PW+ is described, and methods and tools (including the hardware methodology and porting SunOS to PW+) are discussed.<>

Keywords

microcomputers; workstations; 18 MIPS; 25 MHz; 3 MFLOPS; 4 to 64 Mbyte; SPARC compatible system; Solarix/4 Personal Workstation Plus; SunOS; floating point unit; hardware methodology; Application software; Assembly systems; Cloning; Computer aided software engineering; Costs; Packaging; Personal communication networks; Power supplies; Reduced instruction set computing; Sun;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Compcon Spring '91. Digest of Papers

Conference_Location

San Francisco, CA, USA

Print_ISBN

0-8186-2134-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CMPCON.1991.128780

Filename

128780