Texas Instruments Inc has leaped aboard the bandwaggon running for Sun Microsystems Sparc microprocessor with an undifferentiated floating point co-processor chip that is being aimed in the first instance at Sparc applications. The SN74ACT8847 was designed for use with any RISC or complex instruction set microprocessor such as the 80386 or 68030, but according to Electronic News, only Sun has so far had samples. General sampling of the part, which is in 1 micron Epic CMOS, is set for next month. The 8847 includes 64-bit floating point multiplier and 64-bit arithmetic-logic unit, and is claimed to do 30 MFLOPS in both single- and double-precision work. With three ports and 64-bit internal buses, a user can load two operands and take a result in a single 30nS clock cycle.
