The SPARCstation 10 (codenamed ''Campus-2'') is a

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workstat ...

computer made by Sun Microsystems. Announced in May 1992, it was Sun's first desktop multiprocessor (being housed in a pizza box form factor case). It was later replaced with the

SPARCstation 20 The SPARCstation 20 or SS20 (code-named ''Kodiak'') is a discontinued Sun Microsystems workstation introduced in March 1994 based on the SuperSPARC or hyperSPARC CPU. It is one of the last models in the SPARCstation family of Sun " pizza box" com ...

. The 40 MHz SPARCstation 10 without external cache was the reference for the

SPEC Spec may refer to: *Specification (technical standard), an explicit set of requirements to be satisfied by a material, product, or service **datasheet, or "spec sheet" People * Spec Harkness (1887-1952), American professional baseball pitcher ...

CPU95 benchmark.

Specifications

CPU support

The SPARCstation 10 (SS10) contains two MBus slots running at either 36 MHz (33 MHz for the earliest models) or 40 MHz (set via motherboard jumper). Each MBus slot can contain single or dual

SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system develope ...

CPU modules, permitting expansion to up to four CPUs. Both

SuperSPARC The SuperSPARC is a microprocessor that implements the SPARC V8 instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Sun Microsystems. 33 and 40 MHz versions were introduced in 1992. The SuperSPARC contains 3.1 million transistors. It was fabricat ...

and hyperSPARC CPU modules were available. Single SuperSPARC modules without external cache were sold by Sun; they ran at the clock speed of the MBus (uniprocessor Models 20, 30 and 40; dual processor Model 402). Single and a few dual SuperSPARC modules with 1 MB external cache were also sold; they were independently clocked, and ran at a higher rate than the MBus, most commonly 40.3 MHz or 50 MHz (uniprocessor Models 41 and 51; multiprocessor Models 412, 512 and 514). Sun's dual 50 MHz SuperSPARC modules (the only dual MBus modules supported by Sun for this system) were double-width, physically occupying one

SBus SBus is a computer bus system that was used in most SPARC-based computers (including all SPARCstations) from Sun Microsystems and others during the 1990s. It was introduced by Sun in 1989 to be a high-speed bus counterpart to their high-speed S ...

slot per module in addition to an MBus slot. SuperSPARC modules with and without external cache could not be mixed. SuperSPARC modules with external cache could be mixed, even with different clock speeds, but this was not a Sun-supported configuration.

Ross Ross or ROSS may refer to: People * Clan Ross, a Highland Scottish clan * Ross (name), including a list of people with the surname or given name Ross, as well as the meaning * Earl of Ross, a peerage of Scotland Places * RoSS, the Republic of Sou ...

hyperSPARC modules were also available from third party vendors. The SS10 had reasonable cooling capacity given the cramped "pizzabox" case, but it was not designed for some of the higher-speed hyperSPARC modules, and so heat issues were common when these modules were used, particularly in four CPU configurations.

Memory

The SS10 can hold a maximum of 512 MB RAM in eight 200-pin DSIMM slots. 32 MB modules are not supported, though 16 MB and 64 MB are supported.

Disk drives

The SS10's

enclosure Enclosure or Inclosure is a term, used in English landownership, that refers to the appropriation of "waste" or " common land" enclosing it and by doing so depriving commoners of their rights of access and privilege. Agreements to enclose land ...

can hold two 50-pin SCSI

hard drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magne ...

s and a floppy disk drive. Other SCSI devices can be attached via the external SCSI port. There is no ATA disk support.

Network support

There is one onboard

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1 ...

interface, which can be accessed from a built-in 10BASE-T jack or via a special 26-pin port that provides both AUI and audio connections; only one of these network ports can be active at a time. A special cable or adapter is needed to convert the latter port to a standard

DA-15 The D-subminiature or D-sub is a common type of electrical connector. They are named for their characteristic D-shaped metal shield. When they were introduced, D-subs were among the smallest connectors used on computer systems. Description, n ...

connector. There are also two

Basic Rate Interface Basic Rate Interface (BRI, 2B+D, 2B1D) or Basic Rate Access is an Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) configuration intended primarily for use in subscriber lines similar to those that have long been used for voice-grade telephone servi ...

(BRI)

ISDN Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) is a set of communication standards for simultaneous digital transmission of voice, video, data, and other network services over the digitalised circuits of the public switched telephone network. Work ...

connectors; the system shipped with plastic blocking plugs inserted in these connectors. Additional SBus network cards can also be added.

Graphics support

Most SPARCstation 10 systems lack integrated graphics. A very few, referred to as the SPARCstation 10SX, include the SX, or CG14,

framebuffer A framebuffer (frame buffer, or sometimes framestore) is a portion of random-access memory (RAM) containing a bitmap that drives a video display. It is a memory buffer containing data representing all the pixels in a complete video frame. Mode ...

used on the

, requiring a 4 MB or 8 MB VSIMM to operate. All SPARCstation 10s seem to have the VSIMM slots, a cutout in the case and solder pads for the SX's 13W3 connector. Other options include the CG6 (GX, GX+, Turbo GX and TGX+) 8-bit SBus framebuffers, capable of up to 1280×1024 resolution in 8-bit color, and the ZX (Leo). The ZX is a 24-bit card with hardware-accelerated 3D operations, offering high speeds and resolutions, however, it's poorly supported, takes up two SBus slots, and runs extremely hot. Its faster cousin, the Turbo ZX, requires a fan card, taking up all four SBus slots. Full support is only available in Solaris 2.4 through 2.6, though the 2.6 drivers can be made to work in Solaris 7, 8 and 9. Linux includes an accelerated driver for it which supports 2D acceleration features, but no 3D. NetBSD and OpenBSD support it, but without acceleration, while

NeXTSTEP NeXTSTEP is a discontinued object-oriented, multitasking operating system based on the Mach kernel and the UNIX-derived BSD. It was developed by NeXT Computer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was initially used for its range of propri ...

and OPENSTEP have no support whatsoever.

NVRAM

The SPARCstation 10 uses a battery-backed

NVRAM Non-volatile random-access memory (NVRAM) is random-access memory that retains data without applied power. This is in contrast to dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and static random-access memory (SRAM), which both maintain data only for as lon ...

module to hold data about the system, such as the host ID (serial number) and

MAC address A media access control address (MAC address) is a unique identifier assigned to a network interface controller (NIC) for use as a network address in communications within a network segment. This use is common in most IEEE 802 networking tec ...

. If the battery on the chip dies, then the NVRAM module must be replaced (or modified to use an external battery), and the NVRAM must be reprogrammed with a MAC address and host ID. Optionally a M48T08-100PC1 can be used.

Operating systems

* SunOS 4.1.3 onwards * Solaris (Solaris 2.1 to 9; Solaris 10 dropped support for 32-bit SPARC systems.) *

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

* NetBSD/SPARC * OpenBSD/sparc32 - All versions up to 5.9 (OpenBSD 5.9 was the last release to support SPARC32) *

(SuperSPARC CPU modules only) *

OPENSTEP/Mach OpenStep is a defunct object-oriented application programming interface (API) specification for a legacy object-oriented operating system, with the basic goal of offering a NeXTSTEP-like environment on non-NeXTSTEP operating systems. OpenStep was ...

(SuperSPARC CPU modules only)

Related computers

References

External links

SPARCstation 10 Handbook
*http://sunstuff.org/hardware/systems/sun4/ *http://www.obsolyte.com/sun_ss10/ {{DEFAULTSORT:Sparcstation 010 Sun workstations SPARC microprocessor products