LSI Logic Corp has decided to go ahead and create a MIPS Technologies Inc R3000-derived processor designed specifically for use in Internet access terminals. The company reckons it will offer the chip in volume for $50 and is looking to summer availability; combined with 4Mb main memory – about $150 – and modem, the company reckons a manufacturer could put together a box that could sell for about $250 if it used a television set as the monitor. I think companies will be rolling out boxes in the third quarter, and they will be the Cabbage Patch Doll sensation of Christmas 1996, says LSI’s executive vice-president for product strategy, Brian Halla, who believes that Internet access providers may bundle the things in with the service charges. LSI points out that it integrated all the functions of the Sony Corp Playstation onto a single chip, so does know something about the capability of the RISC core and its component library. LSI sees the chip being able to run Java applets, although there is no Java interpreter for the MIPS RISC as yet. It is not clear what skinny executive will be chosen to run on the chip.
