Campbell, California-based Force Computers Inc, signed 18 months ago by Sun Microsystems to be a second source for VMEbus Sparc boards (CI No 1,598), has announced the Sparc CPU-2 board for VMEbus systems integrators to build into embedded applications. Driven by a 40MHz Sparc RISC processor, the board provides up to 28.5 MIPS performance, or 4.2 MFLOPS floating point performance. It supports Ethernet and SCSI-2 interfaces, two serial ports, a floating point unit, 64Kb static-RAM cache memory, 1Mb flash EEPROM memory, and up to 64Mb dynamic RAM, on a standard Eurocard-format board that takes up a single slot in a 6U VMEbus enclosure. Two SBus slots are also provided for input-output expansion, compatible with third-party SBus cards, for access to specialised interfaces for communications, graphics and simulation, data acquisition and instrumentation applications. For compatibility with Sun application software, all standard SparcStation-2 input-output and system functions are implemented on the board, including keyboard, mouse, audio output, floppy disk interface and battery-backed real-time clock. The board also comes with SunOS-compatible Open Boot PROM, which enables dynamic reconfiguration of the system environment, and supports the use of Sun peripheral devices requiring automatic booting of driver code to the operating system; this, for example, enables the board to boot directly from Sun CD-ROM and tape software. The Sparc CPU-2, which comes with SunSoft’s Solaris, is available in two versions: the low-cost Sparc CPU-2S, without VMEbus interface; and the Sparc 2-CE, designed for applications requiring VMEbus expansion.
