ICL Plc expects to join the Sun Microsystems Inc-Fujitsu Ltd alliance in a few week’s time, and will contribute to 64-bit Sparc development and other work. ICL will bring its knowledge of the European market to the deal, and says it will contribute certain unnamed intellectual property rights. Meanwhile, Sun was unable to respond to […]
ICL Plc expects to join the Sun Microsystems Inc-Fujitsu Ltd alliance in a few week’s time, and will contribute to 64-bit Sparc development and other work. ICL will bring its knowledge of the European market to the deal, and says it will contribute certain unnamed intellectual property rights. Meanwhile, Sun was unable to respond to enquiries about a Japanese news wire that landed in New York last week (these things are sometimes unreliable in our experience), which has Sun and Fujitsu planning a November announcement about co-developing next-generation engineering workstations. Comline (sourcing the Japan Industrial Journal) positions this as the second installment of their April tie-up. Meantime, again in a few weeks, ICL will also disclose details of an OEM agreement it has struck with one of the American firms it was courting on a US tour at the time of UniForum. ICL also says it plans to implement a common Peripheral Component Interconnect input-output bus across its Sparc and iAPX-86-based TeamServer and SuperServer machines over the next couple of years. New 90MHz and 100MHz Pentium-based models and 60MHz SuperSparc-based boxes will follow later this year, followed by 133MHz and 155MHz Pentiums by the middle of next year, and P6-based systems in the second half of 1995. On the Sparc side, ICL will use the 64-bit HaL Computer Systems Ltd Sparc in workstations and servers built in collaboration with the Fujitsu clan. First machines will be uniprocessors and are targeted to be four times as powerful as current ICL uniprocessors. Release 1 of the HaL Sparc should be a multichip module with six chips on one substrate – including CPU, memory manager and two caches – all adding up to a whopping 25m transistors.
