Intel Corp is doing more and more of less and less these days, but it is unusual for a company to narrow its focus quite so much as it grows at breakneck speed. Over the past few years, an array of businesses that were shrinking fast as a proportion of the total have been sold, and the latest to go is one of the most venerable, the iRMX real-time operating system and the Multibus boards business. The whole lot is being sold to Beaverton, Oregon-based RadiSys Corp under a letter of intent that would see Intel getting 17%, fully diluted, of Radisys in return. Intel will also get step-up warrants for 300,000 more shares, exercisable within 24 months, and $1.2m cash in 1997. The deal values the business at about $14.5m, plus whatever value is put on the warrants. RadiSys, which already supplies embedded computer systems, focusing on the use of iAPX-86 architecture across many form factors and bus structures, and offering chips, boards, subsystems and firmware. It is committed to long-term supply of the current Multibus hardware and software and development of significant enhancements such as a Pentium Pro Multibus II CPU board. RadiSys reckons the deal should double annual turnover.
