Sun Microsystems Inc made it clear yesterday that Intel Corp was winning out over Motorola Inc as its preferred supplier of merchant complex instruction set microprocessors while its high end future is of course pinned to its own Sparc – see page two, inside – and now Prime Computer Inc has decided to go down the same route. Having committed to an ECL version of Intel’s new 80486 on Monday – for machines that will appear in 1992 – the company has followed up by saying that it will incorporate Sparc RISCs from Sun Microsystems Inc in future engineering workstations, launching the first at the end of the year. The stations will be for the Computervision side of the house, which at present uses Sun-3s in its CADDStation WS3600 line, adding graphics accelerators, software installation tools and user interface management systems. Up to now, Prime has used RISC boards from MIPS Computer Systems Inc: Prime’s decision to use the Sparc casts doubt on the future of that pact.
