Sun Microsystems Inc, a company not previously noted for embedded chips, is aiming to make its presence felt in the high end of the market with its new UltraSparc IIe design. The 64-bit chip will take on rival offerings, such Motorola Inc’s 750 PowerPC, in the network and telecoms market.
The UltraSPARC IIe will run at 400MHz or 450MHz. The chip will include onboard 256Kb level-2 cache memory, a 32-bit 66MHz PCI bus and integrated memory interface and controller. Sun estimates that the power consumption will be 8 watts for a processor running at 400MHz and 1.5 volts. The chip will support Java, ChorusOS, Linux and Wind River’s VxWorks. Peter Palm, group marketing manager for Sun Microelectronics says that a powerful environment for this [chip] will be the JavaOS with Jini layers running on it. Sun claims that the chip will be backwards compatible with the rest of the UltraSparc family.
Palm says that the advantages of a 64-bit architecture for high end applications outweigh any potential problems. We’re going with 64-bit for the speed…but also for the larger instruction set, Palm said. This will mean that Sun can trickle down features, such as TCP/IP protocols and drivers, from the UltraSparc II. Palm says that some customers will require the power of 64-bit processing, despite the memory requirements and higher power consumption. He expects the chip will be used for high end networking applications, such as voice processing in call centers and IP gateway applications. Networking hardware such as hubs and routers will also be a target market.
MIPS has run out of gas for companies like Cisco, he claimed. He said that Sun would be targeting companies like Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens, Philips and Bosch as potential customers for the new chip. The UltraSparc IIe is expected to be released in 2000, no pricing details have been released.
