Sun, Fujitsu will spend $500M to boost Sparc

Electronic News, May 2, 1994 by Jim DeTar

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. -- Sun Microsystems and its long-time manufacturing partner Fujitsu Ltd. last week committed themselves to spend at least $500 million over the next five years to jointly develop new Sparc RISC microprocessors.

The unified roadmap will provide for new 32-bit (Sparc V.8) and 64-bit (Sparc V.9) processors. They will be designed with performance levels targeted at two to four times the performance of Intel's processors, the companies said. The unified Sparc roadmap also calls for accelerated performance of Microsoft Windows applications used in conjunction with Sun's Wabi software technology. In addition, several Sparc processors are expected to provide enhanced floating point performance targeting the technical markets.

Although tightening the relationship with Fujitsu, Sun was quick to say it will continue to work with Texas Instruments. A little over a year ago, Sun laid out a 5-year technology roadmap for its Sparc microprocessors that included commitment to two future iterations of SuperSPARC co-developed with TI (EN, March 22, 1993).

Fujitsu, which is manufacturing the microsparc II, which is now sampling at up to 100MHz, bought Ross Systems last year to enhance its Sparc development efforts (EN, May 17, 1993), and also swallowed up HaL Computer Systems, which has been developing a superscalar version of the Sparc architecture for use in a family of workstations (EN, Oct. 25, 1993).

"Texas Instruments is a strategic manufacturer for us," said Derek Meyer, Sun's director of operations. "This in no way detracts from that relationship. Texas Instruments will remain a strategic manufacturing partner for us. We are a fabless company. We rely on industry-leading manufacturers. Fujitsu is a strategic partner, as is Texas Instruments. This agreement does not rule out other partners coming on-line."

Sun and Fujitsu have entered into three separate agreements: To extend Fujitsu's commitment to resell, distribute and service Sun products in Japan for another five years; to offer a common architecture comprised of interoperable, binary-compatible Sparc and UNIX products based on open systems; and to exchange interface patent rights.

William Raduchel, Sun's CIO and vice president, Corporate Planning and Development, said that despite all the attention the PowerPC is garnering, Sparc remains the dominant RISC architecture in the market. "Most of the cooperation (between Fujitsu and Sun) to date has been buying and selling products to each other. Today, both companies are extending that. We are creating an atmosphere for cooperation for the engineers of both companies in several ways. We are also pleased to announce extension of the existing OEM relationship. This is the largest reseller contract in our history. We are tryingto best allocate the resources each company has to make sure Sparc remains the number one RISC microprocessor."

Sun and Fujitsu said they would use standard, open interfaces and cooperateon emerging standards wherever possible. The core of this aspect of the agreement provides for the cross-license of a wide range of interfaces, although implementations remain proprietary.

Additionally, Sun and Fujitsu have agreed to a broad, royalty-free exchange of patent rights in the fields of computer hardware, software and related technologies filed worldwide by either company before Feb. 28, 1999.

Yoshiro Yoshioka, board member of Fujitsu Ltd. and general manager of Open Systems Fujitsu Ltd., said that Fujitsu holds the leading position in the UNIX systems market in Japan and now "We are focusing more energy toward global expansion and development of business," he said.

Mr. Meyer also said that the joint development work planned by Fujitsu and Sun does not indicate that either company will ratchet down its Sparc development. "We have no plans to eliminate any products. Our intent is to increase the performance of next-generation products. The plan is not to reduce investments in Sparc but to assure they are complimentary."