Fujitsu Ltd’s Fujitsu VLSI affiliate and its Fujitsu Microelectronics in San Jose have jointly developed a new MB86903 version of the Sparc RISC that combines the integer arithmetic and the floating point unit in a single chip. Rated at a maximum 29 MIPS, the MB86903 comes in two speeds – 40MHz and 33MHz. The 40MHz version is $470 and the 33MHz one is $352. Fujitsu is planning to fabricate them – in 0.8 micron CMOS – at at a rate of 20,000 a month – the good ones are sold as 40MHz, those that don’t cut it at 40MHz but work at 33MHz are marked with the slower clock rate.
