No one was immediately able to say exactly what is envisaged, but the Japanese logic chip majors have roped SGS-Thomson Microelectronics NV and the Japanese end of Texas Instruments Inc into one of those national efforts intended to create something that the companies involved have failed to achieve singly. The holy grail in this case is a hit microprocessor that would find its way into the personal computers of the world – but it is not clear whether the chip, intended to combine logic and memory on the same device and to be 50% cheaper than the Pentium Pro at double the performance level, would be a co-processor adding graphics and multimedia functions, or an alternative CPU. Intel Corp has taken it to be the former, but the ambitious terms in which the project is expressed implies the latter. If that is the case, SGS-Thomson points out that it has two alternative fundamental designs it can toss into the pot. As well as the Transputer-derived ST20 family of embedded microprocessors and the device is intended to be a highly-efficient parallel processor – it has full rights to develop future microprocessors from Cyrix Corp’s Cx series of iAPX-86-compatible microprocessors – which in the context of a chip intended for the desktop is a lot more interesting than the Transputer. As well as SGS and Texas Instruments Japan, the other participants are Fujitsu Ltd, NEC Corp, Hitachi Ltd, Mitsubishi Electric Corp, Sony Corp, Toshiba Corp and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd. The consortium will spend about a year deciding how to integrate a broader range of logic, plus memory into a single device. And, based on the research results, each company will be free to design and fabricate its own CPUs for personal computer and multimedia applications, with first products seen in 1998.
