Sir Clive Sinclair is playing his cards very close to his chest these days, but to complement the handful of details that came out about his 200 MIPS emulating microprocessor RISC that surfaced in March (CI No 1,638), word is that he is planning to use it in a world-beating notebook computer that will run Digital Research Inc’s DR-DOS 6.0 and a Mach-like Unix-type kernel called Taos. In emulation mode, it was originally said to match the performance of a 12MHz 80286 but may now be faster. The chip, as reported, is being fabricated by GEC Plc’s Plessey Semiconductors, and industry commentator John Dvorak hears that it has aroused interest at Apple Computer Inc. Dvorak hazards the chip is likely to be 8-bit or even 4-bit and will use parallel techniques to synthesise 16- or 32-bit operations.
