SuperSparc, the fabled Texas Instruments Inc Viking chip that will not now appear in the multiprocessors Sun Microsystems Computer Corp announces this week, has started sampling. How quickly it will become commercially available is another question, depending on how functional the samples are. If lucky, the Texas-Sun collaboration could be in production in a few months, but a part as complex as the now rechristened SuperSparc, with 3.1m transistors squeezed onto the die, could take another six months or a year, hard lines for Sun if it’s to meet the challenge of Hewlett-Packard Co’s 76 MIPS boxes. Neither Sun nor Texas have been specific about Viking’s performance, but it’s believed that the target is at least in the range of 60 MIPS to 80 MIPS.
