The Sparcle is an experimental 32-bit
microprocessor
A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circ ...
chip Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) is a type of immunoprecipitation experimental technique used to investigate the interaction between proteins and DNA in the cell. It aims to determine whether specific proteins are associated with specific genom ...
developed in 1992 by a
consortium of
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
,
LSI Corporation
LSI Logic Corporation, an American company founded in Milpitas, California, was a pioneer in the ASIC and EDA industries. It evolved over time to design and sell semiconductors and software that accelerated storage and networking in data center ...
, and
Sun Microsystems. It was an evolution Sun's
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 ...
RISC architecture
Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...
with features geared towards "large-scale
multiprocessing".
The chip was manufactured by LSI.
Besides these enhancements the Sparcle was otherwise unremarkable, incorporating 200,000 transistors and dissipating two
watt
The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of power or radiant flux in the International System of Units (SI), equal to 1 joule per second or 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3. It is used to quantify the rate of energy transfer. The watt is named after James ...
s. It included no cache and had a clock speed of less than 40 MHz. The new features included:
* Features to tolerate and synchronize memory and communications
latencies
* Features supporting fine-grained
synchronization
* Features to initiate actions on remote processors and quickly respond to
asynchronous events
The Sparcle was used to build the experimental
Alewife computer at MIT.
References
External links
*
* {{cite book , last1=Iannucci , first1=Robert A. , display-authors=etal , title=Multithreaded Computer Architecture: A Summary of the State of the ART , date=1994 , publisher=Springer Science & Business Media , isbn=0-7923-9477-1 , page=163 , url=https://books.google.com/books?id=IkdqkJq2h2kC&pg=PA163 , accessdate=Feb 5, 2020
SPARC microprocessors
32-bit microprocessors
Massachusetts Institute of Technology