It seems International Meta Systems Inc was not simply whistling in the dark when it said that it hoped that RISC-makers would license its iAPX-86 emulator circuitry and use it as a standard cell to embed on their RISC microprocessors (CI No 2,398). US PC Week hears that both Hewlett-Packard Co and Motorola Inc may take the bait, although none of the three acknowledged the discussions. The interest of Motorola is a little surprising, as it implies that IBM Corp will be keeping the PowerPC 615, the one that is planned to have IBM’s own iAPX-86 design embedded with the PowerPC RISC, to itself. As reported, the Torrance, California company’s technology uses on-chip logic to translate iAPX-86 instructions into RISC instructions on the fly, and the claim is that adding it to the Precision Architecture RISC and PowerPC would enable Windows to run at Pentium speeds. The paper hears that MIPS Technologies Inc has a team working on a separate effort to add an iAPX-86 emulation to its R4000 RISC line.
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