OEM versions of the Peripheral Component Interconnect bus technology that Compagnie des Machines Bull SA and Motorola Inc are developing for use in their current and future PowerPC systems will be ready in June, with general availability set for October. Bull will be ready to announce PCI versions of their currently Micro Channel Architecture-only symmetric multiprocessing Escalas in the first quarter of next year. Bull has no agreement with its major OEM customer, IBM Corp on PCI. As expected, Bull was showing four-way PowerPC 604 and eight-way 601 configurations of its PowerScale Escala symmetric multiprocessing boxes running AIX 4.1.2 at UniForum last week. It achieved Unix 93 branding for its AIX implementation from X/Open Co Ltd during the show. Bull, which hopes eventually to offer Solaris, Windows NT and NetWare alongside AIX across it PowerPC systems, says it will have an engineering release of Solaris up on a uniprocessor Escala in June. While Escalas are likely to evolve beyond eight-way configurations over time, later this year Bull will introduce the first cut of its Mississippi clustering technology which will support up to eight Escalas over Fibre Distributed Data Interface. In 1996, Bull will swap out FDDI in favour of its 2Gb per second Inter-System Link interconnect. Bull is seeking development partners for the Link, which is now going into pilot sites. Meantime, Apertus Technologies Inc’s Express Unix-to-SNA communications software will be up on Escala from next month.
