Integrated Device Technology Inc is showing off its latest implementation of the MIPS Technologies Inc R-series RISC, the Orion R4600, at Comdex, where it is running Windows NT in a Tyne Series personal computer from DeskStation Technology Inc, Lenexa, Kansas. The company says that running the Byte suite of NT portable benchmarks, a 133MHz internal, 44MHz external Orion with 512Kb secondary cache, outperforms the 60MHz Pentium by 73% and a 66MHz 80486DX2 by 202%. The 100MHz internal version with no cache does 17% better than the Pentium. The R4600 is a full 64-bit implementation of the MIPS III instruction set architecture but uses a shorter internal pipeline of five stages against eight in the R4000 and R4400, which results in fewer stalls; it has 16Kb instructions, 16Kb data cache using a write-back protocol and two-way set-associativity. Samples of the slower one are set for next month with volume in early 1994 at $240 for 10,000-up. A 3.3V version is planned. The R4600 processor is the first designed for Integrated Device Technology by Quantum Effect Design Inc, a San Jose company formed by three former MIPS engineering managers, which did the work over 21 months with a team of 16 people. An entry-level Tyne system from DeskStation will less than $3,000 with a 100MHz R4600PC processor, 16Mb memory, 240Mb SCSI-II hard disk drive, a Super VGA video board, 3.5 floppy and Windows NT. Separately, Silicon Graphics Inc’s MIPS Technologies Inc unit announced a 200MHz internal version of the R4400 RISC and said that it is now sampling the low-end 64-bit R4200 in an 80MHz version, at $80.
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