henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (02/13/90)
In article <7372@pdn.paradyne.com> alan@oz.paradyne.com (Alan Lovejoy) writes: >... Oh, SPARC is scaleable? >That's nice. It hasn't seemed to provide it with any particular clock rate >advantage so far (both the SPARC and the 88k are in production at 33MHz, >for instance... As John Mashey has pointed out, main-line MOS production clock speeds are limited as much by test equipment as by anything else, because you can't ship chips unless you know they work. Since everybody is buying from the same test-equipment manufacturers, XYZ Vaporchips *can't* get much of a clock-speed lead on ABC Silicrud unless ABC has run into trouble of some kind. Claims of scaleability are relevant to future plans and multi-chip high-end implementations, but don't affect competition in the one-chip arena very much. -- SVR4: every feature you ever | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology wanted, and plenty you didn't.| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu