Furthering its ambitions to make its ShBoom PSC1000 RISC microprocessor a major player in the Java market (CI No 2,967), San Diego-based Patriot Scientific Corp has decided that rather than sign with Sun Microsystems Inc for the Real Thing, it has settled on a clone and signed up with Clearwater, Florida-based NetWise Distribution Inc for the latter’s JPlus clean room implementation of Java for the PSC1000. Describing JavaSoft Inc’s charges as very very high and royalties as fairly substantial, Patriot has chosen instead the JPlusOS Java operating system and JPLus virtual machine. Patriot was also unhappy that licensees of the Shboom chip would also have to pay JavaSoft if they used JavasOS, something that isn’t the case with the NetWise alternative. There are at least five clean room implementations of Java on the market, including versions from embedded systems companies Integrated Systems Inc and Wind River Systems Inc. The two claim that NetWise’s tests, the ShBoom processor executed Java applications 10% faster than the published figures for Sun Microelectronics Inc’s PicoJava processor – the ShBoom is claimed to have performed the javac test in 1.74 seconds and the raytracer test in 12.2 seconds. NetWise says the 8-bit instructions of the ShBoom enabled it to decrease its Just In Time executable size by half, and that the part should find favor with designers of Network Computers, television set-top boxes and embedded devices, although evidence of design wins for the ShBoom are thin on the ground. Patriot claims it will have chips ready by March, and says they will be half the cost of picoJava. NetWise hopes to expand to 20 employees this year.
