Plans for an emitter-coupled logic version of the Clipper RISC processor rated at 60 MIPS were revealed last week by Intergraph Corp as it began volume shipments of its current product, the CMOS C300 processor, which it rates at 13 MIPS and 4.5 MFLOPS. Intergraph claims that more than 18,000 units have been shipped since the Clipper 100 was launched back in 1986 with the claim that it outperformed a DEC VAX 8600 – by the originator, Fairchild Semiconductor, which sold the business to Intergraph after it was acquired by National Semiconductor Corp – and reckons that this makes it the volume leader among general purpose RISC microprocessors. The Palo Alto arm of the Huntsville, Alabama company claims that the new C300 is the most highly integrated RISC chip available, with a 32-bit integer CPU, 64-bit floating point unit and two 4Kb caches and memory management units, all on a six layer printed circuit board that measures 4.5 by 3, including high speed clock chip. The processor comes in just three circuits – a CPU chip with on-chip floating-point unit, and two combination Cache and Memory Management Unit chips, and the three chips for either version are also available in Pin Grid Array packages. The C300 comes in 44MHz and 50MHz clock speed versions, with the 10 MIPS, 44MHz version already used in Intergraph’s Colorsetter 2000 image setter and 3070 Unix-based workstation. The ECL version of the C300, which is expected to top 60 MIPS and 20 MFLOPS, is due for announcement in 1989, although there is no word on when production quantities will be available. The next generation Clipper C400, which will have an on-board vector processor, will be introduced in 1990, coming initially in a CMOS version rated at 30 MIPS and 10 MFLOPS. And a row could be brewing with Motorola Inc over Intergraph’s claim that the 88000 RISC looks suspiciously like the Clipper (CI No 1,070).
