Latest entrant in the Sun Microsystems Sparc RISC stakes is Prisma Inc, the Colorado Springs, Colorado company planning to design an implementation of the Sparc in Gallium Arsenide as the basis for a supercomputer-class machine (CI No 1,019). The system is for shipment in late 1989, with beta testing planned for the summer of 1989. […]
Latest entrant in the Sun Microsystems Sparc RISC stakes is Prisma Inc, the Colorado Springs, Colorado company planning to design an implementation of the Sparc in Gallium Arsenide as the basis for a supercomputer-class machine (CI No 1,019). The system is for shipment in late 1989, with beta testing planned for the summer of 1989. In addition to high speed, said Sun, the processor will provide exceptionally fast interrupt services for input-output and real-time applications. The Prisma processor is being designed for a clock cycle of 4nS – down around the level of Cray Research machines – for peak execution speeds of 250 MIPS, it believes. Included in the licence agreement are Sun’s SunOS 4.0 Unix implementation, C and Fortran compilers, and Sun’s Open Network Computing tools including the Network File System. Prisma was founded in 1986 to design and manufacture supercomputer-class computers for general purpose and technical computing applications.
