Taiwanese Twinhead International Corp’s Milpitas, California-based subsidiary has made good its July promise to deliver a 40MHz Mbus Sparcstation 2 clone. Its TwinStation, previewed at Comdex back in October, is claimed to do 31.5 MIPS, against the Sparcstation 2’s 28.5 MIPS, and is built around a five-chip ASIC set it has been working on, which incorporates the 40MHz Cypress Semiconductor Corp part as the CPU. It comes with from 8Mb to 128Mb RAM, two Sbus slots, 210Mb or 425Mb disks, Ethernet, SCSI, and 17 or 19 colour screens. Twinhead’s UK operation in Basingstoke, Hampshire, primarily an MS-DOS and Novell Inc NetWare personal computer box-shifter, is now gearing up for an assault on the Unix workstation market, and late last month entered negotiations with potential distributors: it expects to sign three or four. The Twinstation will likely be configured with 32Mb of memory in the UK – the firm took delivery of its first three machines last week – although prices won’t be fixed until the reseller channels are in place. Twinhead’s Martin Potter says the price point will be competitive with other offerings, such as the MicroMuse box, and the thing will ship to distributors from the beginning of January. Twinhead has already got a multi-processing design ready, but it is awaiting software.
