Texas Instruments Inc will announce the long-awaited Sparc Viking chip before the end of June – in other words before the end of Sun Microsystems Inc’s fourth quarter. Sun will come out with Viking-based upgrades for the Galaxy multiprocessors, but far more interesting will be what Sun has in store under the code name Sun Dragon. It seems that Viking is destined for a general purpose multiprocessing server capable of 1,500 Specmarks, incorporating 10, 15 and maybe even more processors. Dragon will see the first use of Dynabus, which is not exactly a bus, but a device to connect processors more elegantly, it is understood. The first Dragon could appear in the third quarter, definitely by the fourth quarter. The move could impact HAL Inc, ex-IBMer Andy Heller’s Fujitsu Ltd-backed start-up designing the 64-bit Sparc multi-processor systems for transaction processing: it is unlikely to have its own machines out by then.
