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IIi is optimized price/performance and ease of use for the system designer. Stated differently, the CPU must deliver a lot of performance for the least impact on overall system cost and also enable simplified system design. An important strategy in enabling low-cost SPARC-based systems is to leverage the PC industry economy of scale by using the industry-standard PCI I/O bus. The integrated 66-MHz PCI interface gives the Ultra-SPARC-IIi access to cost-efficient PC graphics accelerators as well as other I/O cards. Since the CPU also contains an interface to Sun's proprietary high-speed UPA64 bus, our own high-end graphics accelerators such as Creator3D can be used. A CPU in the desktop arena must strike the "sweetspot" in a multidimensional battle of conflicting design objectives: highperformance, controlled power consumption, low cost, quick time to market, and a capability for simplified system design. The net result of a system containing an UltraSPARC-IIi will realize a substantial cost savings. More functionality is on the die, and as a result, there are fewer system components; reduced board-level routing, layers, and complexity; and system-level power consumption. Integration attacks overall system cost, but integrating too much or the wrong type of functionality can become counterproductive. Absolute performance is also obviously important, but we attempt to achieve the knee of the cost/performance curve. We wanted to avoid reaching the point where exorbitant area and complexity is required to gain that last 5% of performance. The resulting CPU from this delicate balancing act of simultaneously optimizing many different objectives is an efficient machine capable of taking SPARC into new markets while solidly preserving those that already exist.

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