Tadpole Technology Plc’s choice of the Texas Instruments Inc MicroSparc for its SparcBook 3 series is a kick in the teeth for Fujitsu Ltd’s Ross Technology unit, whose multi-chip Sparc set was the basis of Tadpole’s previous portables. Two-thirds of Tadpole’s $35m 1993 sales were of SparcBook 1s and 2s. Tadpole says difficulties getting SunSoft Inc’s Solaris to run on the Ross part made it opt for MicroSparc and complete compatibility with Sun’s Sparcstation LX. Electronic News hears that the problem is that the Solaris implementation for Ross CPUs doesn’t provide an open boot facility – the mechanism requires the same input-output devices that Sun uses to operate, effectively tying that feature to the Sun architecture. Although Sun announced Fujitsu’s MicroSparc II architecture as early as last October, Tadpole says it can’t think about using the part for at least six months because it is only shipping in only very small sample quantities. Ross believes its superscalar HyperSparc is still a contender for use in future SparcBooks.
