Hal Computer Systems Ltd is working on a fourth generation, 1,000MHz implementation of its 64-bit Sparc64 RISC called Denali it claims will outperform Intel Corp’s second-generation IA-64 part, the 1,000MHz McKinley. Hal and Intel have both named their 1,000MHz (1GHz) parts after North America’s highest peak which the native Athabascan people named Denali, meaning ‘the high one.’ Hal, the Fujitsu Ltd-owned Sparc shop, say it’s looking at a variety of techniques to accelerate Sparc’s performance without breaking binary compatibility with the current Sparc V9 architecture definition. Intel’s use of VLIW has broken the mold insofar as historically VLIW has required code to be compiled for a specific machine and the binaries changed for each new machine. Doing it in software (compiler technology for which Intel has patents) enables code to be compiled once and then run on other machines. Hal, which is only eight or nine months into its Denali work, a project defined a couple of years ago, figures one way of applying VLIW to Sparc without breaking binary compatibility or infringing Intel intellectual property would be to put the compiler into hardware and convert binaries on the fly. Denali will be two years to sampling. Sparc-owner Sun Microsystems Inc’s own fourth-generation UltraSparc IV known as Millennium is due around 2000. Hal’s got a niche technical business selling UltraSparc II-based servers as the HalStation GP7000 and Model 375 and 385 workstations which use its 161MHz Sparc64 II chip. These are clearly not right vehicles for Sparc64 – also used in servers which Fujitsu markets in Japan – Hal admits, and expects Denali to end up in high-end supercomputer and server products from Fujitsu and its enterprise siblings including Amdahl Corp. Hal figures with Fujitsu behind Sparc the architecture is unlikely to go the way of MIPS. It’s supposedly bankrolling Hal to keep Sparc up to date no matter what the cost. Hal is just about to ship a third generation of its Sparc64 processor running at 250MHz which is compatible with Sun’s forthcoming UltraSparc III ‘Cheetah.’ By the way, Hal says it’s had floods of resumes from Silicon Graphics Inc MIPS engineers, but more interesting, many from Cyrix Corp folk abandoning ship now it’s fallen into the arms of National Semiconductor Corp.
