The reasons behind Sun Microsystems Inc’s increasing interest in Pinnacle, the superscalar Sparc chip in development at the Ross Technology subsidiary of Cypress Semiconductor Corp may be starting to surface. In the wake of the International Solid State Circuits Conference in California the week before last, it seems that Sun and Texas Instruments Inc can produce 40MHz versions of Viking with a high degree of confidence, but that a reliable run of the 50MHz chips they were aiming for is more problematical. However, Sun spokesmen, perhaps intent on defusing as much negative press as they can, claimed that Viking had yet to reach the go-no-go point, and that since the project was still within targeted deadlines, the company was confident it could get to 50MHz. One said that the chip was meeting expectations and running well in some applications, though what these circumstances were she did not know. As presently delineated, the Viking effort, so key to Sun’s future performance capabilities, is expected to cause the company some degree of discomfort since even a 50MHz Viking looks awfully puny next to a Digital Equipment Corp Alpha or a Hewlett-Packard Co Precision Architecture 7100 chip. Sun is of course already in the market with machines built using 40MHz Sparc chips.
