Following similar declarations of silicon intent by its industry peers over the course of this year, Hewlett-Packard Co has been revealing the future for its own 64-bit Precision Architecture RISC architecture during 1994 and beyond. Rumblings detected a few weeks ago (CI No 2,319), proved to be only the tip of the iceberg, as the company’s marketing manager for advanced technologies, Jan Silverman, laid out a road-map for the Precision Architecture RISC that goes from the low-cost 7100LC to 7150 and 7200 iterations of the current processor line and on to next-generation PA-8000 and PA-9000 lines. In chronological order, the long-awaited 7100LC, a uniprocessor, is first out of the gate. It will feature in a variety of Unix workstations and servers configurations due to be announced in the New Year and in MPE servers and new local network servers scheduled for mid-1994. The superscalar 7100LC comes as a board with CPU, and generic graphics and input-output chips, plus random access memory. The CPU combines two integer units executing two instructions per cycle – floating point co-processor, memory and input-output controllers. There’s a small on-chip instruction buffer, but combined instruction and data cache – 8Kb to 2Mb – resides off-chip. Up to 2Gb memory is supported. The 14mm square device is fabricated in 0.8 micron, three-layer metal CMOS technology and provides 48-bit virtual addressing. Initial versions will be clocked at up to 80MHz, though iterations going to 120MHz are planned. Hummingbird as the part has been known while under development, has on-board digital imaging, video and audio support with JPEG and MPEG, and is rated at 130 SPECfp92 and 84 SPECint92 in 80MHz implementations. The part is bi-endian, and thus Windows NT-capable – 7100LC boards in the Gecko workstations will be less than half the size of Pentium boards, Hewlett-Packard claims.
