A RISC chip that is claimed to be a universal microprocessor emulator has been launched by Torrance, California newcomer International Meta Systems Inc – and the company wants designers of other RISCs to licence its emulation technology and build it into their own RISCs, be those Alphas, Sparcs, R-series or whatever. The first part to include the technology is called the IMS 3250, which emulates Intel Corp’s 80486 and Pentium, and International Meta has filed a patent for the high-performance hardware-assisted emulation technology. It says that it can use the technology to create parts that emulate the 68040 used by Apple Computer Inc in Macintoshes, and more than one emulation can presumably be included in the same chip. The company also says that peripheral devices such as controllers or a graphics accelerator or a facsimile modem can be largely duplicated by emulation, thus requiring only a fraction of the transistors compared with conventional hardware implementations. The compact IMS RISC core with the microcoded emulation technology is claimed to produce low-cost, low-power, high performance processors ideally suited for portable and handheld computers. Algorithms for image processing, speech recognition, telecommunications and other functions can be embedded into the microcode, achieving performance levels comparable to or exceeding those of the most popular RISC machines at a fraction of the cost. On licensing the technology to other RISC designers, the company claims they could improve their iAPX-86 performance 10-fold compared with their current software emulations, with an increase of under 8% in the size of the chip. In the case of the Alpha RISC, International Meta says that the technology would add 5% more logic to the chip, but would enable it to run shrink-wrapped MS-DOS or Windows programs at two to three times the speed of a 60MHz Pentium. IBM Corp is of course already developing a PowerPC 615 RISC processor that includes iAPX-86 emulation on-chip and is due next year. The IMS 3250 part is clocked at 60MHz and is claimed to run Windows applications nearly as fast as a 66MHz 80486DX2 processor; with only 700,000 transistors, it should sell for around $100, compared with the Intel part, which 1.7m transistors and sells for $360.
