Bill Joy, vice-president of research and development at Sun Microsystems Inc, is trying to persuade his colleagues to back a project that he calls 3000M – 1,000 MIPS, 1,000Mb and 1,000 MFLOPS – to develop a multi-processing Sparc-based machine with that specification by 1995. Joy reckons it that it would take a three-year development effort to do such a system – staffed from next year – but has yet to convince the rest of the Sun team of its viability. Joy envisages the 3000M using up to eight 200 MIPS Sparc CPUs, 2Gb memory and 64-bit memory chips. In the nearer term, Joy, who was speaking at Esther Dyson’s first East-West High-Tech Forum in Budapest last week, confirmed that the company is working on symmetric multi-processing Sparc desktops and servers, and promised machines by the end of calendar 1991. In typically ebullient fashion, Joy predicts that Sun will be the first company to sell 100,000 multi-processing machines, and we’ll do it by the end of 1992. Sun’s entry into multiproc essors has been delayed up to now for business reasons, Joy said. First boxes are likely to ship with a single processor and space for others, though it is not yet known where the multi-processing Unix operating software will come from.
