As forecast, (CI No 2,614), Data General Corp is abandoning its Motorola Inc 88000 RISC architecture for its next generation, and making what it hopes is a safer bet on Intel Corp’s iAPX-86 architecture. The company says it will create a new generation of AViiON servers, and maybe desktop machines as well, that will incorporate up to 100 P6 chips running multiple operating systems including DG/UX, other Unixes and Windows NT. Data General, still job-cutting and losing money, admits the most significant factor in its choice was the financial community’s response to studies made of the price that system vendors pay to support their chosen processor architectures. The decision to go with commodity Intel components became a no-brainer rather than pricier RISCs, it says. The move will se e the company deploy Intel’s planned four-way P6 symmetric multiprocessing motherboards, with memory, cache and a PCI input-output channel across an NUMA Non Uniform Memory Architecture backplane architecture – which is another way of saying distributed shared memory. The interconnect will be provided by Oslo, Norway-based Dolphin Interconnect Solution A/S’s implementation of the IEEE Scalable Coherent Interface, which effectively bridges traditional bus architectures, such as PCI, with a high-speed point-to-point interconnect protocol. It also eliminates the 32-chip bottleneck on traditional backplanes. Dolphin’s Scalable Coherent Interface technology runs at up to 200Mbps now at very low-latency – the time taken to send messages – and is expected to rise to 500Mbps. The well-regarded 64-bit DG/UX, already up on Intel iAPX-86 – but not yet adapted for the new memory architecture – will be the new AViiON’s primary operating system, though Windows NT, Santa Cruz Operation Inc, Solaris, UnixWare, NetWare and others will be offered, it said.