Cypress, Sun: HyperSPARC hypertension

Electronic News, Feb 15, 1993 by Daniel Holden

SAN JOSE, CALIF.--Cypress Semiconductor and Sun Microsystems apparently got their signals crossed last week over whether the Cypress HyperSparc would be designed into any forthcoming Sun products.

Chet Silvestri, vice president of technology sales for Sun, noted at mid-week his company currently has samples of the 66.7MHz HyperSparc. "But we don't have it in any systems, nor do we have plans to use the product. We haven't had any plans to use it," he said.

Cypress took exception to that assessment. "Cypress is negotiating with Sun on the (HyperSparc) product; there's no change in that," said a Cypress spokesman. Cypress president T.J. Rodgers was said to be unavailable for comment.

Following conversations between Sun and Cypress officials, Sun backed away from Mr. Silvestri's comments. Derek Meyer, director of Sparc marketing at Sun, said his company won't make a decision on using the HyperSparc until Cypress is ready with its first customer shipment of production-phase devices. "Cypress needs to get further along those lines before we'll make a decision," said Mr. Meyer. "Until then, we just aren't in a position to make a decision."

The importance of a HyperSparc design-win at Sun to Cypress' financial fortunes has repeatedly been emphasized by Cypress officials. Mr. Rodgers said last spring: "If I don't get business from (Sun), I have two choices. I go out of business, or I find some other business, and both are real options. So they have to decide to what level they want to support their partners" (EN, May 4, 1992).

Earlier this year, after Cypress delivered samples of its RISC processor to Sun, Cypress vice president of sales and marketing Lowell Turriff said Cypress would consider defecting from the Sparc camp and licensing another RISC architecture if Sun did not adopt the HyperSparc. "We would consider working out a relationship with Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment Corp. or anyone in the business if it makes sense," he said at the time, although noting there was no such imminent agreement (Desk Topics, Jan. 4).

The financial community is also keeping close tabs on the situation. Mark Edelstone of Prudential Securities recently stated "Last year, Cypress's Sparc revenues were about $40 million (or 15 percent of sales), and without a commitment from Sun these revenues will decline sharply in 1993, with limited upside potential in 1994."

Mr. Edelstone estimated Sun could purchase $30 million worth of HyperSparcs from Cypress this year if a deal is made. The value would increase to $65 million in 1994, he forecast. Without a Sun deal, Cypress' MPU business would decline to $15 million this year and remain flat in 1994, according to Mr. Edelstone.

Cypress' chief nemesis to date appears to be Texas Instruments, whose SuperSparc moved into volume production last spring and, despite nearly a year of delays, apparently beat Cypress for the MPU slot in Sun's SparcStation 3 (EN, May 11). Sun and TI jointly described the 3.1 million transistor BiCMOS superscalar processor at last year's International Solid State Circuits Conference (EN, Feb. 24, 1992). By contrast, Sun's Mr. Silvestri noted last week Cypress built the HyperSparc of its own initiative, without any commitment from Sun.

Looking ahead to further design-in opportunities, a TI spokesman last week confirmed the company is working on a higher-speed version of its SuperSPARC, which currently has a clock frequency of 40MHz. He added "We'll be working with Sun on that," but declined further details. He did note, though, that Cypress' Mr. Rodgers "has been pushing a higher-speed Sparc" to Wall Street analysts and potential customers.

Sun's Mr. Meyer declined to disclose any details of its HyperSparc evaluation. "It wouldn't be appropriate to talk about the details of the technology that has been made available to us by our suppliers," he said. "If Cypress were to provide Sun with a higher-performance version, then we would indeed evaluate it," he added.

Meanwhile, Sun last week said it intends to sell its SPARCserver systems with native NetWare technology from Novell. Sun said it marks the first time the company will offer server hardware without an accompanying operating system, but other deals may also follow.

Sun said the NetWare technology will be embedded on an exploding kernel called JumpStart which will be introduced next quarter. Sun president Scott McNealy said the JumpStart kernel loads the operating system "and then goes away," making boot functions essentially invisible to the user.