A 5th generation SPARC64 processor is fabricated in 130nm SOI CMOS process with 8 layers of Cu metallization. It runs at 1.3GHz with 34.7W power dissipation in the laboratory. The chip contains over 190M transistors with 19M in logic circuits. The chip size is 18.14mm x 15.99mm. The error detection and recovery mechanism is implemented for execution units and data path logic circuits in addition to on-chip arrays to detect and recover from data logic error. This processor is developed by using mostly in-house CAD tools.

We developed a 1.3-GHz SPARC-V9 processor: the SPARC64 V. This processor is designed to address requirements for enterprise servers and high-performance computing. Processing speed under multiuser interactive workloads is very sensitive to system balance because of the large number of memory requests included. From many years of experience with such workloads in mainframe system developments, we give importance to design a well-balanced communication structure. To accomplish this task, a system-level performance study must begin at an early please. Therefore we developed a performance model, which consists of a detailed processor model and detailed memory model, before hardware design was started. We updated it continuously. Once a logic simulator became available, we used it to verify the performance model for improving its accuracy. The model quite effectively enabled us to achieve performance goals and finish development quickly. This paper describes the SPARC64 V microarchitecture and performance analyses for hardware design.