Out in Front: November 23, 1995

SPARC Technology Business, a division of Sun Microsystems, continues its push into the embedded-systems area with price-slashing on its microSPARC boards and the introduction of UltraSPARC boards. The company is aiming its products at applications such as telephony and network servers, imaging systems, and communications switches.

The SPARCengine-5 boards use the micro-SPARC processor and carry the right to use the Solaris operating system. In addition, the boards include interfaces to 10-Mbyte/sec Fast SCSI, 10-Mbps Ethernet, and a 64-bit local bus for video and image data transfer. The boards also come with three SBus slots having full master/slave capability. The company has recently slashed prices on the boards by as much as 20%. The SE-110-0, based on the 110-MHz microSPARC, now costs $2200 (100); the SE-85-0B costs $2000.

The Ultra 1 boards use the UltraSPARC processor at clock speeds of 143 and 167 MHz. The board architecture includes a crosspoint switch matrix to connect the CPU to main memory and the SBus bridge, allowing CPU-to-memory transfers at 600 Mbytes/sec. The processor's extended instruction set includes block copy for moving data among network layers, partitioned add/multiply instructions to speed checksum calculations, and four simultaneous 16-bit multiplies to speed data encryption. The instruction set also includes a pixel-distance instruction for MPEG motion estimation.

Two Ultra 1 boards are now available. The Ultra 1/140 uses the 143-MHz processor; costs less than $6000 (100); and includes audio, serial, and parallel I/O ports. The board also offers three SBus slots as well as SCSI and Ethernet connections. The Ultra 1/170 uses the 167-MHz processor, has two SBus slots, and includes Fast/Wide SCSI and 100-Mbps Ethernet. It costs less than $8200. Both boards will be in production in January 1996.
-- by Richard A. Quinnell

SPARC Technology Business, Mountain View, CA. (408) 774-8119.