Although Amdahl Corp says it works very closely with Fujitsu Ltd on all areas of research and development – and has done so from the start – manager for systems marketing Europe Martin Evers stated it has not committed to joining the Fujitsu-Siemens AG alliance (CI No 2,202) because its mainframes are targetted at different markets: but he added, Amdahl’s technology is all co-ordinated by Fujitsu, and while there will be no sudden change, the on-going trend is towards increasing similarities in design; cost is of paramount importance here – because the mainframe market is so flat – and Amdahl needs to ensure there is no duplication of research and development; the group currently customises its instruction sets and lays out its processors in a slightly different way to Fujitsu, Evers said, to optimise performance, but all mainframes that follow the 5995M, which began shipping on Friday, will incorporate more standard Fujitsu components, such as processors, and designs.
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