Digital Equipment Corp has rallied a Laguna Hills, California start-up, Carrera Computers Inc to its Windows NT-on-Alpha cause and the company will begin selling motherboards built around the 150MHz Alpha AXP RISC chip in the third quarter according to US PC Week. Personal computer and workstation manufacturers are expected to be able to use the board to build powerful file servers in the $10,000 price bracket. Meantime the agreement under which Encore Computer Corp may switch to the Alpha from the Motorola Inc 88000 that it presently uses (CI No 2,048) is apparently not a done deal yet. According to Electronic News, the two hope to wrap up negotiations within 60 days, but that terms for Encore to do Unix System V.4 and Oracle7 reference implementations for the Alpha, and possibly license its Unix clustering capabilities to DEC, are not yet finalised. DEC would also like Encore to buy some Alpha AXP systems and offer them in place of its real-time 91 and 93 systems, as well as building successors to its parallel Infinity 90 machines out of Alpha microprocessors.
