Back in June, Hewlett-Packard Co was dropping big hints that it would be announcing and delivering new Snake workstations and upgrades based on its next-generation 7110 Thunderbird Precision Architecture RISC chip sometime before its fiscal year ends in October. At that time it hadn’t made up its mind whether it was going to deliver an immediate response to Sun Microsystems Inc’s Sparcstation 10 announcement – and ship systems later on in the year – or make a big splash in the autumn with deliveries pretty much straight after. Last week, sources within Hewlett-Packard confirmed that September 15 is the day the firm has chosen to launch two workstation models thought to use the 7100, possibly a 740 Coral II (Coral is the 750) and 725 King Cobra II (King Cobra is the 730). The superscalar 7100 will operate at up to 100MHz and do better than 120 (old) SPECmarks, the firm claimed at the chip’s launch.
