Sun to Unveil New Processor Architecture : A "convergence processor"

Electronic News, August 2, 1999 by Arik Hesseldahl

Sun Microsystems Inc. last week confirmed that it has designed a new processor architecture that promises to deliver breakthrough performance in complex multimedia applications.

The new architecture, which Sun has dubbed MAJC, or Microprocessor Architecture for Java Computing, (pronounced "magic"), is described by Sun as a radical departure from previous RISC- and CISC-based instruction set architectures. MAJC will be targeted at applications ranging from set-top boxes, to video games, to handheld devices, to telephones, to thin clients and medical imaging products. Sun said the chip could, in one implementation, render an animated feature of equivalent quality to Pixar's "Toy Story" in nearly real time.

"If what they are saying is true, then they have opened up a completely new direction with this architecture," said Max Baron, a semiconductors analyst with Cahners In-Stat Group. "Certainly electronic games will go in a new direction, if indeed they can honestly compare this to 'Toy Story.'"

Sun will unveil the new architecture at the Hotchips Symposium at Stanford University later this month, and will later announce its own chip based on the architecture at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose in October. Following that, it will seek to license the architecture to others.

Many details regarding the architecture are still under wraps, but Jeff O'Neal, Sun product marketing manager, described the new architecture's capabilities in an interview last week.

"We're calling it internally, a general-purpose convergence processor," he said.

O'Neal said the chip will feature, among other things, chip multiprocessing, or CMP, the capability to run multiple processors on a single chip.

"This is like different independent CPUs on the same chip," said Tom Halfhill, an analyst with Microdesign Resources, who has been briefed on the architecture. "One of the things that makes this possible is the ongoing march of Moore's Law. You have more transistors you can play with, so what do you do with them? The last few years we haven't seen many creative answers to that question other than a lot more cache. This is a more creative answer."

The chip's CMP ability will allow it scale up and down, O'Neal said.

"We can get down to low-cost, low-power designs," he said. "Not all the way into the deep embedded space, but we can get into the consumer space." That could mean screen telephones and game platforms but also affordable high-quality medical imaging applications, he said.

The seeds of the MAJC architecture were planted more than four years ago, when Mark Tremblay and Bill Joy, Sun's architects on the UltraSPARC architecture, took a walk together. They wondered what it would be like to design a chip without having to worry about supporting legacy applications.

At the time, Sun's Java language was only one month old. The two men first decided that the chip would have to be good at handling Java's multiple threads. Second, they determined it would have to be based on VLIW technology, or Very Long Instruction Word, a CPU architecture that allows many instructions to be executed simultaneously.

O'Neal said that while there's nothing new about using VLIW--Fujitsu Ltd., Philips and Intel Corp. have all developed microprocessors that employ VLIW techniques--Sun will be using it in a unique way.

Third, the two Sun executives decided that the architecture would also feature high bandwidth I/O capability in relation to computing bandwidth.

"Mark observed that I/O bandwidth is going to require a larger percentage of the performance necessary in balancing computer vs. I/O," O'Neal said.