It was thought earlier this year that Amdahl Corp’s RISC development effort had been settled on the Sun Microsystems Inc Sparc design, for which its 44% shareholder Fujitsu Ltd is a licensee, and is said to be developing a high-end version of the RISC with Amdahl. But the Sunnyvale company told analysts last week that while the Sparc was its primary focus for a future RISC-based mainframe – designed to run its UTS implementation of Unix, it is still evaluating other RISC architectures, although it declined to be specific when asked whether the MIPS Computer Systems Inc R4000 or IBM Corp’s Rios were among those under evaluation, saying that it was looking at several others apart from Sparc.
