Sun Microsystems is starting to take umbrage at all the pot shots everybody has been taking at it over the Viking chip. It’s not true that the chip isn’t making its original schedule, says advanced development director Dave Ditzel. It takes time to do these things. They’re not being debugged. Sun seems to want to chalk up a lot of its failure to describe Viking further than it did at the Hot Chips Conference last August to the admittedly stringent rules laid down by the International Solid State Circuits Conference. The Conference demands first crack at any of the information published in the papers read there and will bar a company for bending the rules quicker than you can say a sexy microprocessor. Suffice it to say that full details of the Viking SuperSparc will be given there next week. Texas Instruments Inc is expected to announce its existence shortly thereafter.
