UltraSPARC-III : An indepth study
Sanjeev Dwivedi and Anandha Gopalan

Abstract:

This paper does an indepth study of the UltraSPARC-III processor from Sun. The UltraSPARC-III is the third processor from Sun to implement the 64-bit SPARC V9 compliant architecture. This processor can issue up to four instructions per cycle and can reach clock rates of greater than 1-Ghz. The performance is improved over the earlier versions of UltraSPARC by scaling both bandwidth (ILP) and latency. The design permits high scalability to build systems consisting of thousands of UltraSPARC-III processors. UltraSPARC-III maintains binary compatibility with all existing SPARC applications and the Solaris operating system. This paper also talks about the Visual Instruction Set, which is an extension to the instruction set of SPARC V9.

Keywords - Microprocessors, Computer architecture, pipelining, integrated circuits, cache.