Attempting to steal a march on Intel Corp’s Merced chip, details of which are likely to be unveiled at next week’s Microprocessor forum in San Jose, California, Sun Microsystems Inc’s Microelectronics division has announced details of its third generation of UltraSPARC chips, the UltraSPARC III, which should enable it to scale to 1,000 processor-plus systems with full backwards compatibility for application software. Sun confirms that it does see Merced as a competitor, but the company is being careful not to comment until Intel reveals the precise details of its offering. Starting at 600Mhz, the new chip is likely to see the company through to the end of the century with speeds eventually up to around 1,000Mhz. It will be fully backwards compatible, from both an operating system and application software point of view, enabling users to upgrade simply to UltraSPARC III where greater performance is required. What the company cannot yet be sure of, is whether Merced will have backwards compatibility, or whether programmers will be forced to change their code. UltraSPARC III is due to sample next summer, ready for production at the end of next year, and should offer performance boosted by a factor of two or three over the previous generation, the company says. Sun insists the development is on time and on target, and reckons there are rumors that Merced may be behind schedule. The UltraSPARC III is a family of processors which the company says will very quickly rise to even greater speeds. It is targeted quite specifically at the high-end network server market, being driven mainly by the internet and corporate intranet. It will be manufactured by Texas Instruments Inc, initially produced with 0.25 micron CMOS technology, and going down to 0.18 micron.
