Sun Microsystems Inc and Texas Instruments Inc are said to be irked at the behaviour of Fujitsu Ltd, which has been going around for months bragging that it has a piece of Tsunami, and effectively putting people’s noses out of joint. The upshot of all this is what Sun views as a rather confusing story in last week’s Electronic Engineering Times that is likely to mislead readers unless they bother to unravel it. First of all, Tsunami has nothing to do with Viking or with Pinnacle, or in fact with anything at Sun’s high end. As we have said, it is a high volume, low cost, low power chip that will go into the low-end $5,000 colour Sun boxes. The chip is being made by Texas Instruments and the boxes are imminent. Secondly, there is a second-generation Tsunami design which Sun had the misfortune to code-name Tsunami Plus, which it will rename as soon as it can think of something else to call it. This single-chip silicon, being a next-generation part not intended to see the light of day for the next 18 months, Sun says, has a more agressive set of specs attached to it – specifically 50 SpecMarks at 75MHz. The fact that the performance is more agressive than what Sun expects from the current 50MHz iteration of Viking doesn’t mean that Tsumani Plus will wend its way into a high-end Sun machine, it says. Like Tsunami One, if you will, it’s intended only for the low end, the follow-on to the Tsunamis we’re soon to encounter. By the time the second generation Tsunamis hit the market, Sun figures it will have revved Viking performance way over anything Tsunami Plus has to offer. Thirdly, although these Tsunami Plus chips are likely to be made by Fujitsu, it doesn’t have a deal yet, and at the rate its going, it won’t have one. Fourthly and not to change the subject, Sun seems to be a lot more interested in the high-end Cypress Semiconductor-Ross Technology superscalar Pinnacle chip than it used to be. We won’t speculate on why until we know for certain.
