Sun Microsystems Announces the First Implementation of The MAJC Architecture — the Dual Processor MAJC 5200

Business Wire, Oct 5, 1999

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 5, 1999--

Convergence Processor Will Handle Multiple Types

of Broadband Media Streams on a Single Chip

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq:SUNW) today announced the design details of the MAJC(tm) 5200 chip, the first one to use the revolutionary general-purpose MAJC microprocessor architecture.

The new MAJC 5200 model integrates two VLIW (very long instruction word) microprocessors on a single piece of silicon and is designed to handle the real-time flow of multimedia data.

With the disclosure of these technical details, Sun's MAJC program is on the way to achieving the goal of providing new capabilities for emerging applications requirements in the market. The first MAJC chip design is expected to deliver extraordinary compute and signal processing performance.

"With the design of the MAJC 5200 chip, Sun is delivering on our vision of providing the processing power needed for a new class of convergence applications and affords many exciting opportunities for Sun," said Bill Joy, founder, chief scientist and corporate executive officer, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "These new applications demand an entirely new approach to processing real-time streams of visual and audio information and that's exactly what we are delivering."

Sun's MAJC 5200 design delivers groundbreaking performance in simulated benchmark results across a wide range of applications. The MAJC 5200 chip is expected to be capable of decoding two MPEG streams in real time while simultaneously doing a surround sound audio decode or a Web browsing session. For example, a user could simultaneously view two different television programs delivering finance and news while interacting with a Web site to purchase new business equipment.

In addition, this chip is expected to be able to handle over one hundred voice-over-IP channels while enabling encryption and decompression of the packets over a 10 gigabit-per-second Ethernet connection. This means that a very large number of simultaneous phone conversations could be supported in a small-footprint gateway server device.

In the area of image processing, the JPEG 2000 test set is anticipated to run at 78 MB/s while encoding 8-bit sample images. For networked video, two streams of MPEG-2 data representing five Mbps interlaced sequences have the ability to be simultaneously decoded, with additional processor capacity still available. For teleconferencing under the H.263 standard, six decodes and one encode are expected to be handled in real time. In advanced audio applications, an AC-3 decode of 5.1 channels at 384 kps is predicted to use only seven and one-half percent of the capacity of one of the 5200's two processors.

The MAJC 5200 chip is expected to have a clock frequency of 500 MHz and is expected to tape out by the end of this year. Engineering samples are anticipated in the second quarter of 2000.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision, "The Network Is The Computer (TM)," has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq:SUNW), to its position as a leading provider of high quality hardware, software and services for establishing enterprise-wide Intranets and expanding the power of the Internet. With more than $11.5 billion in annual revenues, Sun can be found in more than 150 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com.

(c)1999 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, MAJC, Java and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.