Giving the campaign to supplant MS-DOS with Unix on the desktops of the world a major boost, LSI Logic Corp, Milpitas, California has launched the first building block chip set for simplifying the task of designing workstations compatible with Sun Microsystems Inc’s Sparcstation 1. The SparKit set is intended to expand the market for Unix workstations built around the Sparc RISC, and LSI Logic reckons that over 40,000 Sparcstation 1s were sold in the first nine months after its introduction in May last year, and that some 23 manufacturers are designing add-in cards for the system’s open S-bus. The SparKit Family consists of seven circuits – including the Sparc CPU itself, which can also be used in Sparc-based servers, and comes in 25MHz and 40MHz versions, rated at 18 and 29 MIPS respectively. The parts in the 0.7 micron CMOS set are the L64811 Integer Unit, L64814 Floating-Point Unit, L64815 Memory Management, Cache Control and Cache Tag; the L64850 Memory Controller Unit; the L64851 Standard Input-Output Controller, the L64852 M-bus-to-S-bus Controller and the L64853 Direct Memory Access Controller; the SparKit-25 set costs $1,327 for 1,000-up with samples of the full set in 90 days; the SparKit-45 will be available in the second half. It supports both the M-bus and the S-Bus. The M-bus is a 64-bit, 400Mbytes-per-second bus that decouples system boards from silicon implementations and enables CPU modules and memory modules to fit into the Sun-defined M-bus for uniprocessor or multiprocessor configurations; fully synchronous, it supports 40MHz and 128-byte burst transfers. SBus is a synchronous 32-bit bus for high bandwidth peripherals such as SCSI ports and Ethernet adaptors and transfers at 80Mbps to 100Mbps. LSI says that six firms are already designing the chip sets into products, and that while initial implementations will likely start at $8,000, prices will fall to $5,000 within nine months, $1,000 in two years.
