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Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
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Meet the people whose lives, choices and achievements shaped the journey.
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Wilmington, North Carolina once had a thriving Black middle class and an elected interracial government. In 1898 white supremacists used violence to overthrow that government, kill Black residents and drive many others from the city.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
| General information | |
|---|---|
| Launched | 1993 |
| Discontinued | 1996 |
| Designed by | Ross Technology |
| Performance | |
| Max. CPU clock rate | 40 MHz to 200 MHz |
| Physical specifications | |
| Cores |
|
| Architecture and classification | |
| Instruction set | SPARC V8 |
The hyperSPARC, code-named "Pinnacle", is a microprocessor that implements the SPARC Version 8 instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Ross Technology for Cypress Semiconductor.
The hyperSPARC was introduced in 1993, and competed with the Sun Microsystems SuperSPARC. Raju Vegesna was the microarchitect. The hyperSPARC was Sun Microsystem's primary competitor in the mid-1990s. When Fujitsu acquired Ross from Cypress, the hyperSPARC was considered to be more important by its new owner than the SPARC64 developed by HAL Computer Systems, also a Fujitsu subsidiary, a view which was shared with analysts.
The hyperSPARC was a two-way superscalar microprocessor. It had four execution units: an integer unit, a floating-point unit, a load/store unit and a branch unit. The hyperSPARC has an on-die 8 KB instruction cache, from which two instructions were fetched per cycle and decoded. The decoder could not decode new instructions if the previously decoded instructions were not issued to the execution units.
The integer register file contained 136 registers, providing eight register windows, a feature defined in the SPARC ISA. It had two read ports. The integer unit had a four-stage pipeline, of which two stages were added so the pipeline would be equal to all non-floating-point pipelines. Integer multiply and divide, instructions added in the V8 version of the SPARC architecture, had an 18- and 37-cycle latency, respectively, and stalled the pipeline until they were completed.
The microprocessor supported multiprocessing on MBus systems.
The hyperSPARC consists of 1.2 million transistors. It was fabricated by Cypress in their 0.65 μm, two-layer metal, complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) process. Later iterations of the hyperSPARC have more transistors due to new features, and were ported to newer processes. They were fabricated by Fujitsu, except for the last iteration, which was fabricated by NEC.
The hyperSPARC was a multi-chip design. It was packaged in a ceramic multi-chip module (MCM) with a pin grid array (PGA).
The hyperSPARC used the Cypress SparcSet chipset which was introduced in late July 1992. It was developed by Santa Clara, California start-up Nimbus Technologies, Inc. for Cypress, who fabricated the design. SparcSet was also compatible with other SPARC microprocessors.
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The hyperSPARC, code-named "Pinnacle", is a microprocessor that implements the SPARC Version 8 instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Ross Technology for Cypress Semiconductor. The hyperSPARC was introduced in 1993, and competed with the Sun Microsystems SuperSPARC. Raju Vegesna was the microarchitect. The hyperSPARC was Sun Microsystem's primary competitor in the mid-1990s. When Fujitsu acquired Ross from Cypress, the hyperSPARC was considered to be more important by its new owner than the SPARC64 developed by HAL Computer Systems, also a Fujitsu subsidiary, a view which was shared with analysts.
The SPARCstation 20 (code-named Kodiak) is a workstation made by Sun Microsystems. The SPARCstation 20 was released on March 29, 1994, alongside the lower-end SPARCstation 5. The SPARCstation 20 shipped with dual SuperSPARC or hyperSPARC CPUs, supporting up to four such CPUs all running in parallel. It sold for between US$12,195 at the low end to US$29,995 at the high end (equivalent to $39,078–122,538 in 2025). Sun superseded the SPARCstation line in November 1995 with the Ultra series, which featured UltraSPARC processors.
Gayle Jennings-O'Byrne (born August 3, 1969) is a venture capitalist and founder of the Wocstar Fund, a venture capital firm that invests in women of color ("WOC") and diverse inclusive teams in the tech sector. She is best known for her work to empower women of color startups and help build wealth in communities of color and diversity. Her management and consulting company managed the iNTENT Manifesto campaign to mobilize women startups and allies across the globe. A major funder included JPMorgan Chase and was kicked off with an OpEd in Axios by Jamie Dimon, CEO JPMorgan and Steve Case, CEO Case Foundation. She has spoken at such summits and forums as United Nations, Aspen Ideas Festival, SXSW, Roadmap to Billions: Black Women Talk Tech, 5th Element Group and has appeared on Sirius XM radio and the NASDAQ TV network discussing the financial markets and the global economic outlook.
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 developed in the early 1980s. First developed in 1986 and released in 1987, SPARC was one of the most successful early commercial RISC systems, and its success led to the introduction of similar RISC designs from many vendors through the 1980s and 1990s. After acquiring Sun, Oracle Corporation ended its SPARC development in 2017, though Fujitsu continued shipping SPARC-based servers into the 2020s.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →The Greenwood District.