Last year the European Commission’s DG 13 information technology Directorate General set up a European Microprocessor Initiative to hunt down a home-grown microprocessor technology to become a standard building block for European system developers. More or less by default, the Initiative became a vehicle for SGS Thomson Microelectronics BV’s Inmos Transputer technology, but other firms baulked at this and cried why Inmos? As a result, the Initiative, which was part of the Commission’s Esprit collaborative research and development programme, was abandoned, but is to be replaced by an Open Microprocessor Initiative. This hasn’t been allocated any funding as yet, but it is a live project, already endorsed by the likes of Sun Microsystems. Sun gave a presentation of its Sparc RISC technology to those involved at the end of last year. However according to two leading vendors, the new Initiative has a fundamental identity crisis to resolve before it can hope to reach any decision, namely what is its goal? If the aim is to do everything in-house, with European born and bred technology then Inmos would have to be among the leading contenders, with the Acorn Computers Plc Advanced RISC Machines Ltd device as the only other obvious contender, these vendors conclude. However if the object is to increase the trade balance of the European computer industry in general, then the vendors argue that the Open Initiative must consider a wider range of technologies from outside the Community, especially those that will likely be leading industry standards in the future. The aim of Esprit is to encourage the development of new, European technology and one of the first success stories from the Spirit workstation project will likely be X Window multi-card software developed by UK firm Harlequin Ltd, Cambridge. It runs on the Acorn processor, Sun Microsystems’ Sparc chip – which rumour has is now being used as the basis of the original Spirit workstation, replacing Motorola’s 68040, the original choice, and has sound. Groupe Bull is now reported to be designing some system-level technology around it.
