Assiduous industry watchers will have noticed the dog that didn’t bark – or hasn’t barked so far – in all the talk of the Microsoft-Compaq-MIPS workstation standard consortium, and that dog is Japan Inc. NEC Corp is the main licensee of the MIPS RISC design in Japan, and is unlikely to want to be left out of any major new workstation initiative, especially as such a development could pose a threat to its market-dominating PC-9800 personal computers in Japan. But Toshiba Corp, carefully planting a foot in each of the two leading RISC camps, is a licensee of the MIPS architecture as well as being a major reseller of Sun Microsystems Inc workstations and uses Sparc chips in its first Unix laptop. Toshiba will reportedly announce first fruits of its design licence agreement with MIPS in the form of its own RISC chip this spring. Toshiba, an Architecture Licensee for the MIPS part, has not denied that there was a relationship with MIPS, but said the report had resulted from questions asked by a Japanese reporter, and was not an official announcement of a new product. MIPS similarly had little comment on the report, aside from saying that Toshiba had been an original foundry for MIPS itself, and it held Toshiba’s CMOS semiconductor process technology in extremely high regard. Toshiba gives the impression of trying to hedge all its bets, because it also has a long-standing relationship with Motorola Inc, and the two companies recently began producing Motorola 68000 chips at their joint venture plant Tohoku Semiconductor in Northern Japan – but without a lot of blandishment from Motorola, it seems unlikely that Toshiba will put any muscle behind Motorola’s contender in the RISC stakes, the 88000.
