Compagnie de Machines Bull SA believes that it has mapped out a strategy that will take it from sub-$3,000 units to systems using a home-grown 144-way Interconnect Serial Link. As well as buying the Motorola Inc PowerStacks in under an OEM agreement, the company says it also has rights to tinker with them. It is, therefore, planning to produce systems for $3,000 or less, which will be based on Novell Inc NetWare servers and could rival iAPX-86-based offerings. Solaris, Windows NT and AIX also figure in Bull’s low-end plans, although the company says that NetWare is the key. Above those will sit its re-badged, low-end RS/6000s; although Bull says it has not yet decided whether to embrace the new 40P desktop machine, the first to meet the PowerPC Reference Platform spec. Above those, in the $20,000 to $150,000 range come the symmetric multiprocessing Escalas, with future Mississippi clustering anticipated beyond that. Further up the scale will be parallel systems linked by Bull’s ISL, Inter-System Link, connection now under development.
