SuperH licenses 64-bit RISC to server maker

SuperH licenses 64-bit RISC to server maker
By Semiconductor Business News
November 11, 2002 (1:48 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20021111S0026

SAN JOSE, Calif. --- SuperH Inc., the joint venture formed by Hitachi and STMicroelectronics to own and develop the SH series RISC processors has licensed its SH-5, 64-bit iteration of the architecture to Server2Net Inc., a server computer developer.

Server2Net will develop system-on-chip (SoC) devices for their Nfiniti fabric server products, SuperH said.

“We believe that their [Server2Net's] heterogeneous server architecture is ideally placed to address the market needs for multimedia platforms,” said Rick Chapman, vice president of sales and marketing at SuperH, in a statement. “The SH-5 is the most efficient 64-bit CPU core on the market which is amply demonstrated by Nfiniti's ability to pack up to 768 CPUs in a system delivering over 7,300-GOPS performance.”

Vahe Manugian, vice president of engineering for Server2Net, said that the SH5-based Nfiniti system would include up to 3 racks with 16 blades each and with up to 16 processors p er blade.

“This will allow us to produce a high density blade server with up to 256 CPU cores per rack while maintaining the high reliability demanded by the application. At the same time, the SH-5 core based blades integrate well in our heterogeneous, processor agnostic environment which is important for offering flexibility to IT departments using our NFiniti Servers in their data centers,” he said in the same SuperH statement.

The SH series of RISC processors have their own interconnect bus, called SuperHyway and this will be used by Server2Net to link multiple SH-5 cores with Server2Net's NPlane non-blocking fabric switch technology.