Tera Microsystems Inc, Santa Clara, California has come out with a chip set for building clones of Sun Microsystems Inc’s Sparcstations and says it will enable companies to bring colour machines to market for under $5,000. Called microCore, the set consists of four chips and is claimed to be the most highly integrated implementation of the Sparc support logic on the market, providing all the functionality for a full colour Sparc workstation apart from the processor – it says that the set enables the motherboard to be built with a total of 19 devices plus memory – and only two of the chips are required to make low-cost monochrome, diskless or portable Sparc workstations. Tera believes that the one millionth Sparc system will be shipped in 1993 and that in 1994 over a million Sparc systems will be shipped. Unlike the Sparc CPU makers like LSI Logic Corp and Fujitsu Ltd, which are concentrating on the integer processing unit, floating point unit and cache and memory management systems, Microbytes Daily notes, Tera intends to ignore the integer and floating point processing units and concentrate on the cache, memory management, graphics, input-output, glue logic, and memory control subsystems, leaving manufacturers to choose their own chip supplier. An entry level chip set consisting of a System Controller and an Input-Output Controller operating at 25MHz, enough to build a mono system with no SBus expansion, will cost $400 when you buy 5,000-up. The full set at 33MHz is $745 for 5,000-up.
