The Advanced Computing Environment lives on, sort of, or if it is dead, NEC Electronics Inc has not heard about it and the Japanese company’s contribution to the festivities at Comdex/Spring in Atlanta is the launch of a new reduced instruction set computing chip set, the MCT-DP/MCT-ADR designed to facilitate development of high-performance systems based on the R-series architecture. The company also announced the ARC100 and ARC150 manufacturing kits that include the Advanced RISC Computing chip set as well as all of the hardware and software necessary to develop systems to run Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT. The highly integrated three-chip set acts as an interface to NEC’s highest performance microprocessors, the Vr4000 and Vr4400. The set consists of two types of devices, the MCT-DP data path controller and the MCT-ADR address path controller, each running at speeds up to 50MHz. Two MCT-DP chips are implemented to provide the system’s data path for input-output and memory. One MCT-ADR chip is required for the address path and system control logic. The ADR chip also includes the memory (DRAM) controller, slave mode Vr4000/Vr4400 bus interface, input-output device control logic, video interface controller, interval counter and direct-memory access controller. The ACR chip set features a 64-bit path for graphics and a 128-bit path for main memory. Average power dissipation for the MCT-DP is less than 1.2W and for the MCT-ADR less than 1.5W. The ARC100 manufacturing kit features all of the necessary hardware and software for a system based on the Vr4000PC or Vr4400PC primary cache CPUs. The ARC150 manufacturing kit uses the Vr4000SC or Vr4400SC secondary cache CPUs. The kits include an ARC chip set, Vr-Series microprocessor, paper schematics of the system and associated documentation, read-only memory and hardware abstraction language binaries. Gerber tapes for the mother and daughter boards are also included. The three-chip set is out now at about $100 in quantities of 10,000. Both the ARC100 and ARC150 manufacturing kits are planned for July at $5,000 each. NEC also expects to provide manufacturing support for the Acer Inc PICA chip set, another Windows NT system design for manufacturers of low-cost machines. NEC plans to sample the Vr4200, first member of its low-power line formerly called VrX, by the end of 1993.
