Back in October last year, Convergent Technologies Inc was one of those companies most doubtful about the benefits of upgrading its 68020-based systems to Motorola’s new 68030 microprocessors: it said that the chip’s extra performance would mostly be lost due to the integrated memory management unit, which it believed was slower than Convergent’s own proprietary optimised memory management unit for the 68020. But according to European vice president Roger Cooper, Convergent has now reconsidered, and is likely to announce adoption of the 68030 over the next few months. Our salesman are fed up with trying to explain why we are not using the 68030, said Cooper, who predicted that Motorola’s recently previewed 68040 processor would not be available for at least a year. Convergent, which recently won an OEM contract from Unisys Corp for its Intel-based Server PC range, now has 90,000 Unix systems installed worldwide, or 18% of the total installed Unix base, according to InfoCorp’s latest figures. Convergent Technologies announced extensions to its existing product range earlier this month (CI No 921).
