Logic Inc hopes to ride the Sun Microsystems Sparc to turn itself into a major player in the merchant microprocessor market, and following its move to offer a building block chip set for cloning the Sparcstation-1 (CI No 1,389), the Milpitas company has teamed up with Metaflow Technologies Inc, the San Diego company working on a 100 MIPS ECL Sparc (CI No 997) and Hyundai Electronics America, San Jose to develop the next generation Sparc chip. The new part, code-named Lightning, is to be the basis of the next generation of high-performance RISC-based personal workstations to be introduced by Hyundai in 1991. All three expect that the Lightning will be the highest performance CMOS processor available in the 1990s, initially doing 80 MIPS on most compiled programs. It will be based on a unique architecture developed by Metaflow that is claimed to improve efficiency and performance significantly, and Hyundai has acquired the rights to the technology. Planned for first half 1991, Lightning instructions will be executed out-of-order and execution will continue on speculation beyond unresolved branches as well as executing multiple instructions concurrently, while retaining full compatibility.
