Although the planned MIPS Technologies subsidiary of Silicon Graphics Inc will retain research and development responsibility for the R-series RISC processors, a Silicon Graphics vice-president is to head up the multi-processing effort under MIPS chief executive Bob Miller. Silicon Graphics’ endeavour to produce a floating-point-intensive R4000 part called TFP in conjunction with Toshiba Corp by next year, is being re-integrated into the MIPS unit, taking some 40 Silicon Graphics engineers along with it. The reason being given is that in retaining the project for itself, Silicon Graphics’ goal of portraying the MIPS architecture as vendor-neutral would be compromised.
