Data General Corp has turned its back on the PowerPC as the successor to the Motorola Inc 88000 RISC in its AViiON Unix servers and workstations, and is leaning towards Intel Corp’s iAPX-86 architecture, today’s edition of our sister paper Unigram.X reports. The company’s post-88000 strategy for the AViiON line looked at one time to be a sure-fire PowerPC gain, but it says it has lots of trouble with PowerPC as a viable alternative to 88000, seeing the chip as little more than an AIX engine. Not only does Data General now have a well-tested implementation of its highly-regarded DG/UX Unix up on iAPX-86, but says it is now also more interested in Sun Microsystems Inc’s UltraSparc RISC than PowerPC. It is still expected to use PowerPC in some capacity, but as an embedded controller for its successful CLARiiON disk array and tape storage range, not as a mainstream CPU. It is under no pressure to make an early decision, because it has only just switched to the second generation 88110 chip and there are several future iterations of that on the way from Motorola.
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