Acer Group, which, along with Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA, is believed to be one of the few OEM wins for the Advanced Computing Environment initiative, demonstrated an Advanced RISC Computing system based on the MIPS Computer Systems Inc R4000 chip back at its launch. However, reports suggest that it doesn’t intend producing the MIPS box it’s been showing off after all – at least not the way one would expect. Proving, wags are saying, that MIPS never really counted for much in the whole ACE equation, Acer will reportedly make a system with interchangeable CPU modules, allowing the user to install either an Intel Corp 80486 (or perhaps P5) CPU card or an R4000 CPU card. Olivetti is thought to have a similar strategy in place. And Acer has belatedly launched the Altos 4500 series of Santa Cruz Unix-based mid-range systems, for 12 to 50, users in the UK. The boxes, which were shown at Comdex in the US last October, go from UKP8,000 to UKP14,000 here and will be upgraded to use Intel’s 50MHz 80486 part in future.
