Sun Microsystems Inc unveiled its UltraSparc chip set at SunWorld last week, along with the immediate sampling of UltraSparc processors, at 143MHz or 167MHz, with volume next quarter and machines seen from Sun by the end of the year. The chip-set supports Net.Core, a system interface specification due to become generally available this summer. Sun says that a dozen OEM customers for the Sparc are already building Net.Core-compliant systems, a number it hopes to double over the next six months. The company has also built the first of what it says will be a series of Net.Core hardware reference designs, Net.Core SBus, a uniprocessor design including system schematics, bill of materials, manufacturing and design automation information, development tools and consultancy, to help OEM customers build to a base-line reference platform. Further reference designs for multimedia, multiprocessing and alternative bus architecture models will be forthcoming. All will be based on what Sun calls the UltraSparc Port Architecture, UPA, a basic hardware architecture design that Sun says centralises critical functionality, reducing memory and shared data latencies to an absolute minimum. UltraSparc, unveiled last September, is the new pipeline for future Sparc development at Sun, and its main hope of holding up in the performance stakes against increasingly fierce competition. Sun anticipates the new chip set will enable it and its OEM customers to build 167MHz UltraSparc systems that will run at an estimated 240 SPECint92 and 350 SPECfp92. That still doesn’t give Sun a lead in performance terms, where the DEC’s Alpha is still top of the pile. But Sun is trying to move the performance goalposts somewhat by emphasising multimedia performance, through UltraSparc’s extra VIS graphics instruction set supporting two-dimensional, three-dimensional image and video processing, Motion Pictures Experts Group-2 image decompression and audio processing and networking data throughput, using extra block load/store instructions and split data and instruction buses.
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Production pricing for 1,000-up is $1,100 for 143MHz, and $1,600 for 167MHz. UltraSparc Data Buffers are an extra $85 for 1,000-up. The set, which consists of a Uniprocessor System Controller, UltraSparc Port Architecture to SBus Interface, eset/Interrupt/Controller and Crossbar Switch-Uniprocessor, is out this month in samples, with production by October. The set is $450 per 1,000. The 12 UltraSparc adopters that went public at SunWorld are Axil Computer Inc, Cray Research Inc, CDAC, DTK, Force Computers Inc, Haitai Electronics Co, Hitron, LG Electronics (Goldstar), Tatung Co, Themis, Toshiba Corp and Trigem Computer Co Ltd.
