All three surviving mainframers in Japan – Fujitsu Ltd, Hitachi Ltd and NEC Corp – are now planning a parallel RISC and Unix escape route for their mainframe customers, Electronic News reports from Tokyo. The intention, over time is to convert all their applications and all appropriate system software to parallel Unix. Fujitsu has settled on the Sparc RISC, and is talking in terms of a parallel machine using it in 1995 or 1996. Hitachi has reportedly not yet made up its mind whether to use the Hewlett-Packard Co Precision Architecture RISC for which it is a licensee, or adopt the IBM Corp-Motorola Inc PowerPC. NEC is sticking with the MIPS Technologies Inc R-series RISC that it fabricates, and hopes to bring its first machine to market at about the same time as Fujitsu, if not sooner. In the meantime, all three are racing to cut the cost of their proprietary mainframe hardware by switching to CMOS from ECL – or in NEC’s case CML – Current Mode Logic. NEC says its target is to cut the cost of manufacturing its mainframes by 75% by making the switch to low-power CMOS.
