Life is so tough in all parts of the personal computer business that San Jose-based Chips & Technologies Inc is having to draw in its horns and concentrate on the highest-volume parts of its building-block chip set business. It is therefore seeking buyers for the Multi-processing Architecture Extension chip set business, which provides an integrated set for building 80486-based machines with up to six 50MHz processors. It is also making further lay-offs. The architecture was originally conceived as a method of harnessing the power of low cost microprocessors to the needs of large departmental computing, with the input-output bandwidth generally associated with mainframe and minicomputer architectures – a message-based 128-bit wide internal data bus in a directory-based write back multi-processing implementation. It is supported by Santa Cruz Operation Inc Unix System V.3 with MPX 1.1 extensions and the Unix Systems Laboratories Inc System V.4 MP. The set comprises the 92C390 Cache Directory Comparator, 92C392 System Control Unit Memory Controller, 92C393 DMA Controller, 92C395 Processor Data Switch and 92C397 80486 Cache Control Unit. There is also a CPU board, memory board, EISA interface board, DMA board, and passive backplane for implementing a scalable 80486 multi-processing system. Assets for sale include design and semiconductor manufacturing databases, rights to patents and other intellectual property, software, and other items related to design, manufacturing and testing. The company is to cut is workforce by an additional swingeing 20%; it has already cut 10% since July and is reserving an additional $16m to $20m for possible excess and slow-moving inventory for the second quarter to December 31, and expects that the period will show a loss.
