SandCraft Announces Production Release of World's Highest Performance MIPS64 Microprocessor at 600MHz

SR71000, SR71010 Chips Successfully Complete All Qualification Requirements Per JEDEC Standards

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- SandCraft, Inc., a leader in the design of high-performance MIPS® processors, today announced commencement of production shipments of the SR71000 and SR71010, 600MHz MIPS64 microprocessors, making them the highest performance MIPS64 microprocessors in full production release on the market. The SR71000 and SR71010, built on UMC's 0.15um MPU Copper process, are available in speed grades of 500, 550 and 600 MHz. More than a dozen companies are currently evaluating the processors, with the prime applications being in networking and imaging systems. Designed to maximize performance and minimize power consumption, the new devices offer a SysAD bus and pin compatibility with existing parts, which permits easy system upgrade.

"The strong correlation between our design targets and the qualification results further validates our high quality design methodologies and flows," said Paul Vroomen, president and CEO of SandCraft. "With the performance data that we have gathered through this process, we have also been able to validate our value proposition of providing superior system performance through higher clock frequency, larger caches and improved L3 cache performance. From this, we also have high confidence that our follow on 0.13um processor, currently in fabrication, will achieve its target 800MHz performance."

The SR71000 and SR71010 are dual-issue superscalar microprocessors. The architecture is based on the MIPS64 Instruction Set and incorporates a deeply staged multi-pipelined design with dynamic branch prediction and low power consumption. Featuring an easily scalable architecture to allow migration to GHz speed grades, it is the first in a series of advanced processors being developed at SandCraft to target the high-end server, imaging and communications market segments.

SandCraft offers a complete support toolkit for the SR71000 and the SR71010, the SR71010tk1 priced at $4999.00, available now. The SR71010tk1 leverages standard third-party software tools and an embedded operating system from Wind River (VxWorks), to give developers programming flexibility along with rapid time-to-market. The SR71000 and SR71010 have booted many of the RTOS systems used in the networking and imaging industry. A Linux OS will be released for the devices in Q1 2002 also. The SR71010tk1 toolkit development board provides ethernet ports and logic analyzer connection ports for convenient code development and debugging; a full set of compilation tools, including an optimizing C complier from Red Hat optimized specifically for this CPU architecture, linkers, loaders, libraries and a full set of documentation, including the SR71000 User Manual and Tools Manual.

About the SR710X0

SandCraft has carefully crafted the SR710X0 to achieve the maximum speed and efficiency demanded by high performance embedded applications. This MIPS64-class processor can issue and execute up to six instructions per clock cycle, into a pipeline that uses out-of-order issue and dispatch, and in-order retirement. Its highly efficient, two-way superscalar architecture incorporates dual instruction fetch, dual dispatch and dual commit, to maintain a throughput of two instructions per cycle.

The processor has a nine-stage superscalar pipeline for high clock frequency, with a pipeline-bypass architecture optimized for minimizing instruction-independent stalls. Its sophisticated, dynamic branch prediction capability sustains performance with 97 percent accuracy, by keeping the pipeline fully utilized and minimizing branch mispredictions. The implementation methodology of the CPU allows it to be rapidly migrated to more advanced processes and therefore higher clock frequencies, without necessitating changes to the pipeline architecture. This ensures that a customer's investment in developing with this architecture will be protected as process technology advances.

The SR71000 optimizes system performance and reduces system cost with integrated on-chip memory, including 32 KB each of primary instruction and primary data cache and 512 KB of unified secondary cache. The SR71010 adds tertiary cache control, including on-chip tertiary cache tags that can support up to 16 MB of external tertiary cache using commodity SRAMs. The 4-way set associative primary caches and 8-way set associative secondary and tertiary caches provide capacity and rapid access to critical data and instructions. The processors also support cache line locking and prefetching for improved performance.

About SandCraft Inc.

SandCraft, founded in June 1996, develops and markets advanced superscalar microprocessors, based on the MIPS Instruction Set Architecture for use as computing engines in high-performance embedded applications. These processors are primarily targeted for use in communications applications, such as control plane processing in Internet core and edge switch routers. Office automation applications, such as color laser printers and raster image processing, also utilize processors of this class. For more information, visit http://www.sandcraft.com .

CONTACT: Sabrina Joseph, Marcom Manager, +1-408-490-3213, or sabrina@sandcraft.com, or Alfie Gilbert, Director of Sales, +1-408-490-3277, or alfie@sandcraft.com, both of SandCraft, Inc.