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

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.<>