Sun Microsystems Inc’s 400-person Sparc Technology Business unit yesterday announced that it is going into the chip-marketing business, offering all existing and future Sparc chips and ASIC support chip sets worldwide through its own newly-created sales and distribution channel. The lines will be added to Technology’s current product lists of Sparcstation designs, Sparc board and Sparc CPU designs. Texas Instruments Inc and NCR Corp will continuing sell chips and ASICs respectively. Target customers include computing products and embedded applications. Sparc Technology will be selling ASIC chips identical to those used in Sparcstation 10 and Sparcstation LX products. It will also have SX graphics chips, designed for SuperSparc systems but not yet used by Sun. To complement the graphics chips, it is also making available a new board design package that integrates SX chips with Sparcstation 10 technology. It will also announce that it is ready to sample Swift, its Fujitsu Ltd-made 32-bit MicroSparc-II chip almost a calendar quarter ahead of schedule. Sun is holding back pricing until the parts become generally available in the first quarter. It says Swift delivers two to three times the performance of the original Tsunami chip and is sampling 70MHz versions. The 3.3V MicroSparc-II, fabricated in a 0.5-micron CMOS process, features 16Kb instruction cache and 8Kb data cache, each four times greater than its predecessor. It will deliver performance in the range of 51 to 63 SPECint92 and 43 to 56SPECfp92, while operating at 75MHz to 100MHz with existing compilers, Sun said. It sees the chip, which supports Solaris 2 and NetWare and will use the ASIC support chips for its predecessor, being used in laptops and notebooks.
