SPARCstation 10
| Company type | Public |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer hardware |
| Founded | February 24, 1982 in Santa Clara, California, United States |
| Headquarters | Santa Clara, California , United States |
| Products | Workstations, servers, software |
The SPARCstation 10 (internally designated as Campus-2) is a workstation computer engineered by Sun Microsystems. Introduced on May 19, 1992, its price ranged from US$18,495 to US$57,995. Encased in a slim pizza-box style chassis, the SPARCstation 10 was Sun’s inaugural desktop model to offer factory-installed symmetric multiprocessing. It was eventually replaced by the SPARCstation 20.
The 40-MHz variant without an external cache served as the baseline system for the SPEC CPU95 benchmarking suite.
Sales
Mass production commenced in September 1992. By December of the same year, shipments surpassed 19,000 units across all configurations. In 1993 alone, Sun distributed an additional 80,000 units. By February 1995, combined sales of the SPARCstation 10 and its successor totaled approximately 250,000 units.
CPU support
The SPARCstation 10 (SS10) is equipped with two MBus slots operating at either 36 MHz (33 MHz on initial versions) or 40 MHz, configurable via a motherboard jumper. Each slot can accommodate single or dual SPARC CPU modules, enabling up to four processors in total. Both SuperSPARC and hyperSPARC CPUs were offered. Sun marketed single SuperSPARC modules without external cache that ran synchronously with MBus speed (used in uniprocessor Models 20, 30, and 40; and the dual-processor Model 402), as well as single or certain dual SuperSPARC modules featuring 1 MB external cache running asynchronously at higher clock rates (commonly 40.3 MHz or 50 MHz) found in Models 41, 51, 412, 512, and 514. The dual 50 MHz SuperSPARC modules—Sun’s sole dual MBus offerings for this system—were physically wider and consumed one SBus slot along with an MBus slot. Mixing modules with and without external cache was not supported; however, modules with external cache operating at different frequencies could be combined, although this configuration was unsupported by Sun.
Third-party hyperSPARC modules from Ross Technology were also available. While the SS10’s compact "pizzabox" design provided sufficient cooling for standard configurations, it was not optimized for the higher thermal output of faster hyperSPARC CPUs, particularly when all four CPU slots were populated.
Memory
The SS10 supports up to 512 MB of RAM through eight available 200-pin DSIMM slots. Compatible memory modules include sizes of 16 MB and 64 MB; however, it does not accept 32 MB modules.
Disk drives
Within its enclosure, the SS10 can house two internal 50-pin SCSI hard drives alongside a floppy disk drive. Additional SCSI peripherals may be connected via an external SCSI interface. This system does not provide support for ATA drives.
Network support
An onboard Ethernet interface is integrated into the system and accessible either through a built-in 10BASE-T connector or via a specialized 26-pin port that supports both AUI and audio signals; only one network interface can be active simultaneously. A dedicated adapter allows conversion of this port to a standard DA-15 connector.
Two Basic Rate Interface (BRI) ISDN ports are included but are shipped with blocking plugs installed by default.
Network connectivity can be further expanded by adding SBus network cards.
Graphics support
The majority of SPARCstation 10 units do not include onboard graphics capabilities. A limited subset known as SPARCstation 10SX models come equipped with the SX (CG14) framebuffer originally from the SPARCstation 20, which requires installation of either a 4 MB or an 8 MB VSIMM to function properly. All SPARCstation 10 machines feature VSIMM slots, a case opening, and solder pads designed for connecting the SX’s 13W3 video connector. Other graphics options encompass CG6 series (GX, GX+, Turbo GX, TGX+) SBus framebuffers providing up to an 8-bit color depth at resolutions reaching 1280×1024 pixels, as well as the ZX (Leo) framebuffer. The ZX is a high-performance 24-bit card capable of hardware-accelerated three-dimensional graphics delivering superior speed and resolution but suffers from limited software support, occupies two SBus slots, and generates significant heat. The Turbo ZX variant requires an additional fan card and utilizes all four available SBus slots. Comprehensive driver support exists within Solaris versions 2.4 through 2.6; Solaris 2.6 drivers can be adapted for use on Solaris releases from version 7 to version 9. Linux provides accelerated two-dimensional driver support but lacks three-dimensional acceleration; meanwhile, NetBSD and OpenBSD offer compatibility without acceleration features; neither NeXTSTEP nor OPENSTEP provide support for these graphics cards.
NVRAM
The SPARCstation 10 relies on battery-backed NVRAM to retain essential system information such as the host ID and MAC address. In the event of battery depletion, the NVRAM unit must either be replaced or adapted to support an external power source, followed by reprogramming with the appropriate MAC address and host ID. The M48T08-100PC1 serves as a suitable replacement option.
Operating systems
- SunOS version 4.1.3 and later
- Solaris versions 2.1 through 9 (note that Solaris 10 discontinued 32-bit SPARC compatibility)
- Linux
- NetBSD/SPARC
- OpenBSD/sparc32 (support available up to release 5.9)
- NeXTSTEP (compatible exclusively with SuperSPARC CPU modules)
- OPENSTEP/Mach (compatible exclusively with SuperSPARC CPU modules)
References