Sounds as if Silicon Graphics Inc’s embracing of WinTel has presaged a plan to dump its MIPS RISC and move lock stock and barrel to Intel Corp’s 64-bit parts when they arrive. The remaining RISC manufacturers may rub their hands in glee with cries of we told you so if the CNet report is true, however Intel followers will surely claim RISC’s day of reckoning is drawing ever closer. The paper suggests that the MIPS RISC roadmap peters out after an R14000 process shrink of the R12000 for workstations and servers which itself isn’t expected until later this year. Canned are the next-generation H1 (Beast) and H2 (Capitan) parts that were to speed up CPU-to-memory access time. The 300MHz, 0.25 micron R12000 MIPS IV architecture part due by the middle of this year was to have been followed MIPS V H1 and H2 parts although those projects had already been merged into one by the summer of last year (CI No 3,209). R14000 is touted as a 400MHz shrink of R12000. What would happen to SGI’s Cray supercomputer programs and Unix customers is unclear. All four Cray architectures, including the DEC Alpha and ECL vector processor models were supposed to move over to use future MIPS V generation parts, including a variant with an on-board vector processor. SGI has told us many times that it does not plan to port its 64-bit Irix Unix to Intel. Unix-on-Intel camps including DEC, Sun and Santa Cruz Operation Inc are now sure to step up their efforts to lure SGI’s Irix customers. SGI didn’t return calls by press time. SGI’s said to have given its chip engineers large pay rises and bonus incentives to stay on.

Cast-off

It had once been thought that SGI and DEC might somehow have enjoined their MIPS and Alpha development efforts but it looks as if both will now ultimately fall by the wayside as mainstream CPUs that were unable to achieve a critical mass or accompanying revenue stream to fund further development. Ironically the whole concept of RISC reduced instruction set computing versus CISC complex instruction sets was that each iteration of a basic RISC design would be cheaper than incremental generations of a CISC architecture. It will leave IBM Corp/Motorola Inc PowerPC and Sun Microsystems Inc’s Sparc as the remaining RISC players. Hewlett- Packard Co long ago decided to cast off PA-RISC in favor of an Intel future. MIPS, however, is assured a future in embedded applications such as gaming devices, indeed its use in Nintendo, Sony and other game stations means it leads other RISCs in terms of absolute numbers shipped and SGI has already handed off design and development of these types of MIPS parts to its partners. It’s widely expected that SGI will make this strategy concrete by spinning-off the MIPS unit. SGI CEO Rick Belluzzo’s due to unveil a new-look SGI and plans to stabilize its ailing business at an analyst meeting in New York on April 14.