RISC camps vie for design wins. SPARC goes furthest: will give you board designs. (reduced-instruction-set computers, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Scalable Processor Architecture)

EDN, January, 1990 by Rooney, Paula

RISC camps vie for design wins SPARC goes furthest: will give you board designs Battling for the hearts--and dollars--of RISC-based workstation developers, the three major RISC camps are rushing to establish software compatibility standards and readily accessible board designs that will cut development costs and shorten time to market.

Of the three camps--MIPS Computer Systems Inc, Motorola's 88000, and Sun Microsystems' SPARC--the SPARC group has been most aggressive in seeking hardware support, while the other two have concentrated on software. Consider, for example, that Fujitsu, a SPARC licensee, is selling a 3-board "manufacturing kit" that includes the following: * A CPU board implementing a 25-MHz SPARC MPU with...

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