Corollary Inc is beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel as far as work on its much-altered C-bus II project goes. Although it is not yet production-ready and needs another turn before it is shippable, the Irvine, California company has finally started to send working samples to key OEM customers. The widgetry, started many months ago, was originally intended to offer OEM customers a ready-made symmetric multiprocessing system using 50MHz Intel Corp 80486 chips and two off-the-shelf support chips. Well, technology’s high watermark overtook Corollary, forcing the C-bus II to be recast. Its abiding purpose is still symmetric multiprocessing but by now it is using P54C chips, either the 90MHz or 100MHz varieties, and four support chips, two custom-designed by Corollary: a one-chip memory controller and a C-bus II to Peripheral Component Interconnect bridge chip. It will also provide a Cache Memory Bus Controller and two Data Path Exchange chips, as originally intended. Corollary will also supply a multiprocessor-specific boot ROM and also the multiprocessor BIOS software that OEM customers formerly had to have to supply themselves, thanks to an arrangement with the recently acquired Quadtel arm of Phoenix Technologies Ltd, to produce Phoenix BIOS 4.0 support. Phoenix’s work will supply PCI and Plug & Play support. Corollary says that C-bus II should be in pre-production by October. Although it will support the upcoming OS/2 MP, Solaris-on-Intel, UnixWare II, the symmetric multiprocessing NetWare demonstrated at Novell Inc’s Brain Share summit in April and Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s Unix, its primary application will be NT machines, Corollary says. The company believes the NT market will come into its own next year. Corollary has signed a handful of vendors to use the C-bus including Siemens Nixdorf Informationssyteme AG, Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA and Hitachi Ltd. The European companies are likely to create systems that start at four processors. Hitachi could start at eight, though it remains to be seen whether the Japanese company sells any of the boxes outside Japan owing to poorly developed distribution channels. Corollary sees C-bus II machines going in price from $10,000 to $70,000 with Santa Cruz Unix at the higher end. OS/2, Solaris and UnixWare are more decorative than real, it comments.
