Even if you buy the thesis that the less-fancied RISC architectures are doomed – which in the case of the MIPS Technologies Inc R-series, we don’t, because of the prospects of vast sales into the video games player market – there is strength in numbers, and the companies that look most exposed in the Unix systems market are those such as Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA and Compagnie des Machines Bull SA that have regularly chopped and changed chips: both have been through the MIPS camp, which still numbers MIPS owner Silicon Graphics Inc itself, Tandem Computers Inc, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, NEC Corp, Concurrent Computer Corp, Pyramid Technology Corp among its numbers – if the R-series were to fade, all six would need to go somewhere else fast, but if they could all agree on the same destination, they could share many of the costs, making the transition much less burdensome.
