macintos@pur-ee.UUCP (Thomas E Burns) (10/08/85)
Has anybody heard anything about clipper?
bcase@uiucdcs.CS.UIUC.EDU (10/09/85)
[line eater] Re: has anyone heard anything about clipper? Well, yes. There are a couple of article floating around as of late. There is one in Electronic Design which seems to be fairly accurate (Oct. 3rd issue I think). Basically, it is a 5 MIPS (sustained, not burst) simple (but not RISC I think) processor with two, multiplexed 32-bit busses: one for getting instructions into the processor and one for getting data into the processor. The darn thing runs at 33MHz, so it can turn the buses around quite fast. The first clippers will be mounted on a fine-geometry PC board along with two cache chips (one each for instructions and data). Each cache chip has its own TLB. The caches are 4K bytes. The TLBs are 128 entries in size. I keep wondering if Fairchild will sell the Clipper CPU by itself as a controller chip; with the Harvard memory architecture, it would make a good controller chip, I think. But let's not forget about the Transputer. See the Oct. 7 issue of Electronics for a couple of articles about it. bcase