IMS Rides Again with the Meta6000

Only two companies besides Intel make leading-edge x86 processors: AMD and Cyrix. International Meta Systems (IMS), a small company known for rogue CPU designs, thinks there's room for a third.

IMS claims it will introduce an x86 chip in late 1997 that fits into Pentium sockets and delivers P6-level performance. The CPU will adopt most of the techniques used by other fifth- and sixth-generation x86 processors, including deep pipelines, branch prediction, speculative execution, out-of-order execution, scoreboarding, and rename registers. It will also recognize Inte l's MMX multimedia instructions. Unlike Intel's chips, however, it will support conc urrent floating-point (FP) processing by internally shadowing the FP registers instead of reusing them.

It's difficult to judge the reliability of these claims. IMS has produced some language-specific processors (for Smalltalk and FORTRAN) and is also working on a Java chip. But until now, the company has never competed against the big boys with an x86. In 1992, IMS announced the 3250, a unique RISC chip with rewritable microcode that could emulate an Intel 486 or a Motorola 68000. That chip never came out, although there were rumors that IMS licensed the technology to other companies.

Is the Meta6000 another vaporchip? Could be, but don't forget the NexGen story. NexGen labored for eight years before shipping the Nx586 in 1994. And although the Nx586 never became popular, it was a respectable design that beat AMD's and Cyrix's fifth-generation CPUs to market. Last year, AMD bought NexGen to obtain the sixth-generation Nx686, now called the K6. So don't diss IMS.