The Report

You can read the most current version of the paper here .


ASI

The sparc lets you do weird loads and stores from "alternate address spaces". With this functionality, you can theoretically do non-faulting speculative loads and stores in order to keep your pipelines full and such, or do automatic byte-endian conversions and all sorts of wonderful things like this. An example bit of code that makes use of the endian-conversions and speculative loads can be had here. Speculative stores seem not to be implemented on the UltraSPARC IIi, but some sparc out there might implement them.


Cache

I redid the cache-timing programming project that we had earlier in the semester in CS282. The premise was that you walk over an array in memory, and you can make empirical guesses about the cache architecture of the system. The difference is that instead of the system timing functions, I read the time out of the Sparc %TICK register. This register basically increments about once per instruction cycle...thus you can time things in units of cycles, as opposed to seconds. Mildly interesting.

The data from the program seemed to mimic the data that I collected the first time around using the UNIX clock() function to gather timing information, except for a couple of caveats. Apparently, as the amount of time that it took to walk over the array grew, the odds that we were context switched in the middle grew significantly, and a number of sample points in the test were really outliers.

You can grab


Links of interest


Other Manufacturers of the SPARC:


Stuff to Read (docs published by Sparc and Sun, copyrighted and owned by respective copyright holders):