The following announcement was made today, 3/7/89:

 
 
	SUN INTRODUCES LOW-COST FLOATING POINT ACCELERATOR
		FOR SUN-4 WORKSTATION FAMILY
 
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- March 7, 1989 -- Sun Microsystems today
introduced a new floating point accelerator that boosts floating point
processing performance on all members of the Sun-4(TM) workstation
family by as much as 100 percent or more.  This add-on board, called
the FPU2, allows SPARC(TM)-based Sun-4 workstations and servers to process
at speeds up to 2.2 MFLOPS (million floating point operations per
second), as measured by single precision Linpack benchmarks.
  
FPU2 implements a faster division operation and performs square-root 
functions in hardware.  These improvements increase the Sun-4's
performance in floating point intensive applications such as ECAD
simulation and verification and MCAD analysis, markets in which Sun
is a leader.  FPU2 will also benefit the scientific and earth resources
markets.
 
The FPU2 includes a Sun-designed gate array controller and the TI 8847
floating-point processor from Texas Instruments.  The FPU2 coprocessor
board easily fits into a socket on the Sun-4 CPU board.  All existing
Sun-4 applications will run on the FPU2 without requiring any software
changes, an important feature that will allow current software to
easily realize the benefits of higher performance.  Certain applications
will achieve their greatest improvement in speed if they are recompiled
to execute the square root function in hardware.
 
For the Sun-4/260 and Sun-4/280, FPU2 will be offered in new systems as
a replacement for the current FPU at no additional charge.  It will
also be bundled into all new 4/110 packages at no change in price.  As a
separate option, FPU2 will be available for 4/110s for $3,000.  The
board is available immediately.  
 
Sun Microsystems, Inc., headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., is one
of the world's leading suppliers of network-based distributed computing
systems, including professional workstations, servers and UNIX   
operating system and productivity software.
 
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Press contact:

John Loiacono
336-6424