Sparky Sun chip to run at 1.5GHz

Sun Microsystems has released details of its roadmap up to the year 2002, with its UltraSPARC V chip reaching a speed of 1.5GHz. The company claimed that the processor family will continue to be a performance leader and that it remains committed to the architecture. Mel Friedman, president of Sun’s Microelectronics division, said: "The SPARC architecture is central to Sun's success and we arecommitted to providing systematic performance improvements with this architecture." The roadmap, which covers all three lines of Sun’s chip family, shows that in its S series UltraSPARC II will have a clock speed of 480MHz next year. In the UltraSPARC III family, there will be 600MHz and 750MHz processors and the UltraSPARC IV will clock at 1GHz. The integrated (I) series chips will include system functions with 400MHz, 440MHz, and 480MHz versions of the UltraSPARC Iii shipping next year. The UltraSPARC IIIi willl come at speeds of 600MHz and 700MHz. The last line, the embedded or E line, is aimed at thin clients, network interfaces and control and line cards, said Sun. Versions of this processor will clock at 300MHz, 400MHz and 500MHz. Texas Instruments fabs Sun’s chips, and the company said that some of the processors will use the process technology that company introduced at the end of last month. ®