SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 20, 1998 – QED, Inc., a leading supplier of high-end embedded microprocessor solutions, today announced the availability of the much-anticipated RM7000^TM MIPS® RISC microprocessor. The RM7000 is the first high-performance embedded microprocessor with on-chip second-level (L2) cache memory that significantly boosts overall system performance. QED recently announced that Lucent Technologies selected the RM7000 for their cutting-edge PathStar^TM Access Server.

Designed to meet the requirements of high-performance embedded applications such as network routers/switches, printers, games systems, low-end workstations, 3-D accelerators, and industrial control/vision systems, the RM7000 offers an optimal solution for high-performance embedded market requirements.

"Once again, QED leads the market in delivering the next level of embedded system performance. The availability of the RM7000 represents a new price/performance level that will facilitate the design of many of today's leading-edge embedded applications," said Rick Kepple, QED vice president of marketing. "We anticipate that many of our customers will gain system performance improvement of about 5 times over current systems using RM5271^TM or the QED-designed R5000^TM microprocessors. As a result of breaking the traditional `Moore's Law' performance barrier, we have experienced very enthusiastic customer response, and we believe the RM7000 family will ultimately enable users to enjoy the benefits of a breakthrough level of embedded system performance."

"QED did not achieve this stunning result by solely focusing on the CPU performance, as many other companies do," said Tom Riordan, QED president and CEO. "Instead, QED focused on CPU changes that customers told us were needed to dramatically improve their system performance. We then made the appropriate engineering tradeoff's to deliver a cost-effective solution."

The RM7000 is a high-performance microprocessor with a 12-14 (est) SPECint95 and 14-16 (est) SPECfp95 rating at 300 MHz. It implements the MIPS IV instruction set architecture and features system address/data bus maximum performance at 125MHz for a 1000 MByte peak data transfer rate. It is manufactured using leading-edge 0.25-micron technology. Key features of the RM7000 include: superscalar instruction issue with dual-integer issue, non-blocking caches, 16KB instruction cache and 16KB data cache primary (L1) caches, both 4-way set associative, and a integrated on-chip 256KB 4-way set associative, non-blocking L2 cache.

QED benchmarks for networking applications show that the RM7000 system performance is 3.7 to 6.7 times faster than the RM5271-200MHz. The increase comes from three primary areas of improvement: raw compute power, memory hierarchy and interrupt handling. The raw compute power was increased by nearly 100 percent with the RM7000's 300MHz CPU and dual-integer issue capability. The memory hierarchy improvement due to the 256KB of on-chip L2 cache is nearly 60 percent when compared to a RM5271 system with external L2 cache, and 290 percent faster as compared to a RM5271 system without external L2 cache. An additional 20 percent memory hierarchy enhancement is achieved with the use of the data Prefetch instruction and the implementation of non-blocking caches (for both L1 and L2 caches). An order of magnitude performance improvement in interrupt handling is achieved with the RM7000 by adding hardware support for priority and vectoring with a worst case latency of 166ns when the handler is locked in cache.

Packaging, Availability and Pricing

QED's RM7000 embedded microprocessor is available now with volume production scheduled for late Q398. The product is priced at $150 for 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, RM5231^TM, RM5261^TM, RM5271^TM and RM7000^TM.

Quantum Effect Design's RM52xx, RM52x1 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 terminals, advanced digital set-top boxes, cable modems and other high-speed communications devices.

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

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, RM5231, RM5261, RM5271, RM52x1 and RM7000 are trademarks of Quantum Effect Design, Inc. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.