According to Anil Gadre, Sun Microsystems Computer Corp’s vice-president of systems product marketing, the company’s new chip design licensing strategy announced last week (CI No 1,899), should, for example, enable the Sparc-compatible community to get its hands on the company’s next-generation Viking, or SuperSparc technology – being co-developed with Texas Instruments Inc – much more quickly than the best part of a year that elapsed between the launch of the Sparcstation 2 and the day Sun gave the green light for the LSI Logic Corp-made 40MHz Sparc chip sets to be sold on to Sun wannabes. Gadre claims there will be zero difference in time this time around. However Sun has been playing with the long overdue part for many months now, working closely with Texas Instruments Inc to get the thing up to scratch. Sparcsystem builders will only get their first glimpse of the stuff when Sun finally rolls out its Sparcstation 3 Viking boxes and it is thought to have picked Tuesday May 19 for that. Sun will not say if that is the case, or whether the Viking is successfully being clocked at 50MHz yet.
