TI SuperSPARC for Sun Station 3 in production

Electronic News, May 11, 1992

DALLAS -- Texas Instruments has moved its SuperSparc microprocessor into volume production and, despite nearly a year of delays, has apparently beaten Cypress Semiconductor for the MPU slot in Sun Microsystems' upcoming SparcStation 3.

Cypress will formally introduce its Pinnacle Sparc architecture this week, and will sample to Sun within a month. Sun has parcelled out business to all its Sparc suppliers, and may design Pinnacle into another system later this year.

Regarding SparcStation 3, Wally Rhines, executive vice president of TI, said "I want to leave any system announcements to Sun," but a formal acknowledgement by Sun of the TI design win is expected on May 19.

Meanwhile, Solbourne Computer Inc. last week confirmed that its upcoming Series 6 line of symmetric multiprocessing servers, scheduled for introduction later this year, will be based on the TI SuperSparc microprocessor. The new Solbourne systems, built around a 128MB/second K bus and multichannel I/O, will use multiple SuperSparc circuits.

Asked why TI took almost a year to go from first silicon to production with SuperSparc, which was codenamed "Viking" in development, Mr. Rhines said "It was critical that we achieve complete compatibility with Sun's architecture."

TI is devoting all its current output of the 3.1 million transistor SuperSparc to Sun, and won't be making available volume quantities to other customers until the fourth quarter, although some members of Sparc International may see quantities before then. It has begun accepting orders for 33MHz and 40MHz versions of the part, and plans to begin taking orders for 45MHz and 50MHz versions later this year. The only price being quoted is "under $400" for the 33MHz part.

Because it can execute up to three instructions per clock, the SuperSparc at 33MHz is said by TI to offer performance comparable to 50MHz processors such as Intel's 486.

Built with a BiCMOS process, the 33MHz device offers peak performance of 99Mips, and is rated by TI at 35 to 40 SPECint and 50 to 60 SPECfp. The 50MHz part will have peak performance of 150 Mips, with a rating of over 60SPECint and 80SPECfp, according to TI.

The microprocessor features on-chip support for MBus, enabling up to four SuperSparcs to be combined. Up to 64 SuperSparcs can be connected in parallel through XBus, a packet-switched extension bus.

Also featured on-chip is a 20Kbyte instruction cache and 16Kbyte data cache and a memory management unit.

TI is producing SuperSparc at its fab in Miho, Japan, which was originally constructed to build dynamic RAMs.

David Card, an analyst with International Data Corp., said using the TI microprocessor "will allow Sun to be more competitive with IBM and Hewlett-Packard, but they still haven't caught up yet." He added that although Sun has lagged those two companies in performance for more than a year, it has gained market share during that period.

Cypress president T.J. Rodgers recently said Sun is performing "triage" on its Sparc suppliers, and said he would consider becoming a second source for Digital Equipment Corp.'s Alpha microprocessor should Sun not use Pinnacle in a future system (EN, May 4).