Texas Instruments is ready with the first commercial machine to use its 32-bit Explorer Megachip microprocessor that was unveiled last year (CI No 482), reports Computer Systems News. The Megachip, developed with US Department of Defense money for use in embedded military applications, is rated at 40,000 logical inferences per second – LIPS. Using the new chip, and with increased memory and disk, the Explorer II is expected to outperform the existing bit-slice Explorer fivefold, and also to out-do the Symbolics workstations by two or three times – yet at a lower price. The machine will also come with a new release, 3.0, of the Explorer operating system said to offer improved garbage collection, better compliance with the Common Lisp standard, and better virtual memory performance. The Explorer II is expected to be $99,000, against $29,000 for an entry-level Explorer. Symbolics stations are $36,000 to $122,000.
