Coincidentally with Floating Point Systems Inc signing a letter of intent for an unidentified institutional investor to take a 49% stake in the company for $14.5m (CI No 1,445), Electronic News reckons that Sun Microsystems Inc also plans to buy into the Beaverton, Oregon firm to cement a wide-ranging agreement on high-end Sparc RISC-based machines. The paper reckons that Sun plans to license FPS Computing, as it now likes to be called, to use its Sparc technology – taking the ECL version of the chip in development at Bipolar Integrated Technology Inc – and the SunOS Unix, in a new line of top-end systems, and that Sun would add the new machines to its product line. The FPS Scalar Sparc Processors, expected out in the first half of next year, are said to include a Model 5120S with up to eight of the 66 MIPS Sparcs that woudl deliver 528 MIPS and 134 MFLOPS. It is believed to tak eup to 1Gb of memory and to use a new Scalar Interconnect Architecture bus that would also support an optional Intel 80860 RISC-based Parallel Matrix Co-Processor on each CPU, boosting performance to as much as 2,16 MIPS and 13.4 GFLOPS – in theory outperforming the biggest supercomputer from Cray Research Inc.
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