The world’s fastest 32-bit RISC has been demonstrated by McDon nell Douglas Astronautics Co’s Gallium Arsenide microelectronics laboratory in Huntingdon Beach, California. The part, called the MD-484, has been clocked at almost 60MHz and produces an output every 17nS, the company says. Developed under a US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contract for use in Strategic Defense Initiative studies, the chip is based on a RISC design originated with Agency funding at Stanford University in the early 1980s. It consists of 21,606 transistors using the en hancement mode junction field effect transistor technology pio neered by McDonnell. It has 17 general purpose registers and a full 32-bit arithmetic logic unit; a barrel shifter is included for specialised operations. McDonnell now plans to develop – by 1990 – support chips to enable it to build a single-board comput er around the chip, and believes that the thing will process a typical job mix at over 100 MIPS.
