Texas Instruments Inc had produced a cumulative total of over 70,000 SuperSparc, or Viking, chips by the end of last year, the company told our sister paper Unigram.X last week. These, it says, were all 36MHz and 40MHz versions, and 10,000 or so were 40MHz parts, it swears. The three production sites (two in Texas, one in Japan) doing three shifts a day, will pass the 100,000 mark this quarter. With increased availability, pricing has dropped to a street price of $1,000 apiece for the 36MHz and $1,400 apiece for the 40MHz in quantities of 1,000 – quite a fall from the $1,900 price it gave the Microprocessor Report for the 40MHz version back in December. Texas blames itself for telling the newsletter that that would be the average price for 1993 because it forgot to factor in the industry practice of constantly repricing in the face of better yields. Of course Texas is also discounting and will consider bundled purchases of Tsunami and other chips in coming to final prices. Lead times are now 14 to 16 weeks, and Texas says it has zero product on the shelf. The company claims to be servicing a growing percentage of other customers besides Sun and the companies on the Sparc International executive committee, and the things are being used for parallel systems, high-end superservers and embeded implementations as well as in workstations and servers. The real Viking, of course, was intended to be a 50MHz part. Texas says it has switched to a 0.7-micron process from 0.8, and will be analysing product from every angle before it makes any declarations as to what speed it’s really getting: it is projecting speeds of 40MHz to 50MHz. Samples should be out late this month or early next. It suspects that although the Viking isn’t the so-called performance leader, the volumes it’s producing are higher than at Hewlett-Packard Co. Meanwhile Texas produced between 10,000 and 20,000 low-end Tsunamis by the end of the year, and it expects to double output in the current quarter.
