The first French RISC microprocessor, which is designed specifically for use as an artificial intelligence co-processor, has been developed by a five-year-old 20-employee Cachan, Paris based company called Sodima SA, reports Electronique Actualites. The paper also claims that the part, called Kim, is the third artificial intelligence co-processor after Texas Instruments’ MicroExplorer and Symbolics’ Ivory chips – but Matra Datasysteme might contest that view, putting forward its Drake co-processor (CI No 857). Kim is a 32-bit RISC chip, rated at 10 MIPS when clocked at 10MHz, but the best parts from the trial production runs have been clocked at up to 20MHz, when they are estimated to accelerate symbolic processing up to 20-fold over standard chips. The 17,000-gate chip is currently manufactured – by NEC Corp – in 1.5 micron CMOS, so there is scope to make it faster by going to 1.2 micron design rules. The part has a mere 32 tagged instructions – that is reduced! – 24 bits with an 8-bit tag, 8,192 windows onto 16 32-bit registers, and 16 interrupt levels. Initially the Kim will be offered only as a board-level product, the KIMIPO10, with the chip installed on a triple Eurocard designed to be uses as a co-processor within a Sun Microsystems Unix workstation. The board comes with 256Kb of program memory made up of 35nS access static RAMs, plus 256Kb to 4Mb of data memory organised in 64-bit words. Sodima will also offer its proprietary KOS Knowledge based Operating System as an option on the board – for which no price was given – and it is planning to offer Kim as a component later: sampling is set for September 1989, with volume around the end of the year: the 10MHz version will go for the equivalent of $666, the 20MHz for some $1,333.
