Following the San Jose bash, towards the end of the same month, Sun is finally expected to unveil its Galaxy multi-processors, based on Texas Instruments Inc’s 40MHz, superscalar BiCMOS Viking Sparc implementation, which is being touted at anything up to 80 MIPS. Details of the Viking, which according to Texas is not generally sampling yet, will be made public at the Hot Chips conference in Stanford between August 26 and 27. In fact it will be Sun, not Texas, that will be presenting Viking to the assembled Chippers. As far as its long-standing opposition to X-terminal technology goes, Sun now says that it will work with X-terminal vendors to supply the things as part of client-server architectures where customers demand it. Although Sun says it will not be doing its own X-terminal – it doesn’t have the sales organisation or marketing channels, let alone the inclination to slug it out in that increasingly cut-throat market – it means that the firm should now be able to compete on some of the large X-ter-minal contracts it has previously missed out on because of its resistance to X-terminals.
