An effort by $500m-a-year semiconductor maker Micron Technology Inc, Boise, Idaho to develop its own 64-bit superscalar single-chip RISC processor has floundered, taking with it the subsidiary created a year ago to house it. The FRISC chip, which also gave its name to the operation responsible for it, had reached working silicon and was being put on graphics board and SBus accelerators for the Sparc market when Micron pulled the plug. The FRISC was apparently intended to go into systems eventually. A Micron spokesman said the company ceased investing and reassigned engineers to other projects last month because it wasn’t getting the best bang for the buck. It is unclear whether FRISC Inc sold anything or even attempted to, or whether Micron will try to peddle the technology to someone else. RISC watcher Andrew Allison remembered FRISC as a merchant chip attempt and says he laughed at the subsidiary because it didn’t have the resources or market presence to pull off a new proprietary architecture. FRISC got its name from a design that included on-board floating point and interleaved memory. FRISC Inc had produced a 80MHz chip capable of 80 MFLOPS single-precision at 64-bits and 160 MFLOPS at 32-bits. Sustained performance was said to be 38 MFLOPS to 42 MFLOPS double precision.
