Original Document

QED’s RM5271 Available Immediately at 300MHz

SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 6, 1999 – Quantum Effect Devices, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance, cost-effective MIPS^{?/sup> RISC microprocessors, today announced that its QED RM5271(TM) microprocessor is in production at 300MHz. The speed upgrade enables systems to increase processing power by 20 percent, while providing full compatibility and scalability with the scalable QED product line that includes the RM5230, RM5231, RM5261, RM5271 and RM7000. QED expects to exceed 300MHz in Q4 1999 when the RM5271 becomes available in 0.18 micron technology.}

SGI is the first customer to use the 300MHz processor for the Silicon Graphics^?/sup> O2^?/sup> visual workstation, its entry-level UNIX^?/sup> System that delivers advanced graphics and digital media capabilities. Referred to as the RM5200 by SGI, the RM5271 enables SGI’s O2 system to deliver 69 percent better compute performance and 59 percent better graphics performance than previous-generation systems.

"Our RM5271 provides greater interface flexibility, higher instruction throughput, lower cost secondary cache and additional instructions for DSP applications over our R5000 design," said Andy Keane, vice president of marketing at QED. "The power of the RM5271 is evident in the major system improvements of SGI’s O2 visual workstation enabled by our processor. The system improvements are credited to not only to the power and scalability of QED’s MIPS RISC processor but also to the power of the MIPS RISC architecture."

The RM5271

The 0.25 micron RM5271 has been shipping at up to a 267MHz clock rate since Q4 1998. The upgraded 300MHz RM5271 is rated at approximately 400-Dhrystone MIPS and 600 million FLOPs with a high-performance 125MHz memory interface capable of 1000 MBytes per second peak transfer rates. The RM5200 family also uses a superscalar instruction issue architecture that increases processor efficiency for both the CPU and overall system performance. This architecture enables one integer and one floating point instruction to be processed within one microprocessor clock cycle, thereby achieving higher system performance without increasing clock speed. In addition, customers find a significant system performance improvement with the large 32KB instruction and 32KB data caches and on-chip secondary cache controller.

The RM5271 uses the MIPS IV Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) with DSP instruction (multiply-add, 3-operand multiply) extensions to enhance signal processing, e.g. soft-MODEM or other commonly used DSP algorithms. The MIPS IV ISA is a superset of the MIPS I-III ISA now currently sold by many vendors today.

Packaging, Availability and Pricing

QED’s RM5271 300MHz embedded microprocessor is available now. Pricing for the processor is $140 in 10,000-unit quantities.

About Quantum Effect Design, Inc.

Quantum Effect Design, Inc., founded in 1991, designs, develops and markets high-performance, cost-effective, market-driven embedded microprocessor solutions. The company designed and developed many of the 64-bit MIPS microprocessors including the popular R4600(TM), R4700(TM), R4650(TM), R4640(TM), R5000(TM) and under its own "RISCMark(TM)" label, the RM5230(TM), RM5260(TM), RM5270(TM) and RM7000(TM).

Quantum Effect Design’s RM52xx and RM7000 product families include 32- and 64-bit embedded microprocessors targeted at emerging and fast-growing markets such as internetworking, printers, games, Windows CE-based devices, Internet TV/set-top boxes/cable modems and high-speed communications devices. The company has an unsurpassed record of designing and delivering innovative high-performance microprocessors in breakthrough time-to-volume.

Company headquarters are located in Santa Clara, California. Telephone: 408/565-0300. QED World Wide Web site: http://www.qedinc.com

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MIPS is a registered trademark and R5000 a trademark of MIPS Technologies, Inc. R4600, R4700, R4650, and R4640 are trademarks of Integrated Device Technology, Inc. RISCMark, RM5230, RM5260, RM5270, RM52xx and RM7000 are trademarks of Quantum Effect Design, Inc. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.