Sun’s Sparc microprocessor arrived in the marketplace over a year behind competitive RISC processors from MIPS Computer and Fair child (now Intergraph), but has itself enjoyed a similar head start over the Motorola 88000. But upgraded products from its established rivals combined with impressive claims of 17 MIPS performance at the Motorola launch in April left Fujitsu’s 1.5 micron CMOS implementation of the Sparc, rated at 10 MIPS, look ing decidedly sluggish in comparison. Now comes the next stage in Sun’s scalable architecture strategy: a 0.8 micron CMOS Sparc running at 33MHz from Cypress Semiconductor of San Jose, California (CI No 959). Consisting of the 7C601 integer unit, 7C608 floating point controller, and 7C603 memory management unit, the set will be combined with cache for workstation imple mentations or used stand-alone in embedded applications, and is claimed to have a comparable performance with the 88000 – between 15 and 20 VAX MIPS and 4 to 5 MFlops in floating point work – but to be considerably cheaper and smaller in board area. The Cypress chip set occupies approximately 23 square inches and costs approximately $2,984, compared with 36 square inches and $6,855 for the Motorola 88000. Cypress also claims to offer larger and more cost-effective cache memory support options.
