General Purpose Architecture to Provide Foundation for Convergence Microprocessors
AUGUST 17, 1999 Palo Alto, CALIF. Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) disclosed the technical details of the company's groundbreaking MAJC microprocessor architecture today at the Hot Chips conference. Sun will use this architecture to address the enormous streams of visual and audio data that currently flow over networks and the Internet.
The MAJC architecture was designed to enable processors to deliver a new class of media-rich user experience. This architecture takes advantage of increasing amounts of data coming into the home and the prevalence of Java technology in the marketplace to provide a foundation for a new category of products such as interactive entertainment devices, integrated communications devices and set-top boxes that utilize large amounts of media-rich data.
"Sun's vision is a world where millions of users and billions of devices are connected via the network. The MAJC architecture fits this vision by enabling a new category of devices that bring a new level of experience to the users," said Mel Friedman, president of Microelectronics at Sun Microsystems, Inc. "This architecture is designed to deliver high-performance, low-cost processing over a very broad set of applications, from multi-protocol network infrastructure devices to the consumers' living rooms. In order to meet the demands of the rapidly emerging markets for media-rich networked technology, Sun's design team worked on development of the MAJC architecture for nearly four years to ensure that this project would come to fruition."
The MAJC architecture takes advantage of three growing industry trends: the increasing demand for media-rich user experience, the proliferation of the Java programming language and the increasing availability of networked bandwidth. The architecture is simple and data-type agnostic, while at the same time fully supporting the processor-independent nature and multi-threading capabilities of the Java language.
Chips based on the general-purpose MAJC architecture should be able to process complex graphics and voice data while being able to compute at very high clock rates in networked environments. The architecture, programmable in the Java programming language, C or C++, is designed to be extremely scalable and supports the addition of multiple processors to be placed on a single die.
The MAJC architecture draws from DSP (digital signal processor) and VLIW (very long instruction word) architectures to improve the handling of natural data types. Processors based on the architecture should be able to support high-speed execution of up to four instructions in parallel, while eliminating the heavy silicon overhead usually required to schedule and execute these instructions. At the same time, the MAJC architecture provides freedom and flexibility in determining the best possible sequence of instructions to ensure that all functional units are in use virtually all the time. As a result, all data types, even natural data types (digitized analog signals such as voice and video), are using the same functional units within the MAJC microprocessor.
Copies of Chief Architect Marc Tremblay's Hot Chips presentation on the MAJC architecture can be obtained by visiting the following Web site: http://www.sun.com/microelectronics/MAJC beginning August 18, 1999.
Sun plans to disclose the first implementation of this architecture, which will be used to enhance the capabilities of a Sun workstation, around the Microprocessor Forum this fall.
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision, "The Network Is The
Computer
(TM)," has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW), to its
position as
a leading provider of high quality hardware, software and services
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Internet.
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1999 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
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