Hewlett-Packard Co is already seeing first silicon on two challenging new Reduced Instruction Set microprocessors for use in its 32-bit Precision Architecture machines, the hotter being an NMOS part clocked at 30MHz that will replace two TTL boards in the HP3000 950. It has a three-stage pipeline, and is rated at 15 MIPS, and will have a pair of cache co-processors a la Fairchild Clipper, with a 120Mbyte per second transfer rate between CPU and cache. The part will be described at next month’s International Solid State Electronic Circuits Conference according to Electronic News, which notes that the company will also describe a CMOS 32-bit RISC microprocessor for workstations, with 8MHz clock and 256 byte on-chip cache. Separately, Hewlett-Packard announced that it had cut the price of its HP9000/840 Unix RISC machine, deliveries of which started only in November, by 28% to $81,000, pitching it about 10% below a comparable DEC VAX. The company says the price cut is made possible by cheaper parts and by manufacturing efficiencies.
