NEC Electronics Inc is now sampling 250MHz versions of the 64-bit R4400 RISC, and says the VR4400-250 is the highest-speed version available within its line of MIPS Technologies Inc RISC VR-Series microprocessors to date. Fabricated in 0.35-micron CMOS, it is claimed to offer integer performance of 175 SPECint92 and floating point performance of 178 SPECfp92 – up to 1.7 times the performance of a 100MHz Pentium. The part has 16Kb instruction and 16Kb data caches and supports up to 4Mb secondary cache. It burns 11.5W and needs 3.45V. Samples cost $2,000 each, now, with volume next quarter.
