DEC and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co have been collaborating on the development of a 64-bit RISC microprocessor to the sample stage according to the Japan Industrial Journal, which says that the US and Japanese companies will describe the fruits of their efforts at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in New York next month. Both companies are said to have sampled their versions of the 50 MIPS part, DEC doing one with 64-bit registers but a 32-bit bus with cache controller, integrating 300,000 transistors, Matsushita a 64-bit internal and external version using 450,000 transistors with memory manager and floating point arithmetic unit. It is not clear whether the part bears any relationship to the 64-bit version of the Sun Microsystems Sparc being developed by Matsushita in partnership with its Solbourne Computer Corp affiliate – or to the MIPS Computer Systems Inc RISC that DEC has chosen for the 10 MIPS Ultrix-only workstation due to be launched next week.
