After three years in the making, it seems that Hitachi Ltd’s superscalar Harp 1 implementation of Hewlett Packard Co’s Precision Architecture RISC is not going to go on general release. Manufactured in four lay-er metal to 0.5 micron design rules and packing 2.8m transistors, the 120MHz BiCMOS part is rated at 70 SPECint92, 110 SPECfp92 – Hewlett-Packard’s PA7100 is rated at 80 SPECint92. Harp has a dual cache arrangement compared with the PA7100’s single-cycle external cache, and is larger in size than Sun Microsystems Inc’s SuperSparc, but smaller than the Intel Corp Pentium or MIPS Technologies Inc TFP. Microprocessor Report expects the part to go into production by mid-1994 and estimates pricing at between $1,000 and $2,000. Hitachi may use Harp-1 in its own systems – it is estimated to have sold only a few hundred of the Hewlett-Packard systems it markets under its OEM agreement – and a Harp-2 is expected. Meanwhile, two other Precision Architecture implementations are expected next month for the embedded market – Hitachi’s PA/50, and an Oki Electric Industry Co Ltd offering.
