After months, if not years of procrastination, Hewlett-Packard Co will finally hoist itself into the world of desktop symmetric multiprocessing early next year with workstation based upon its forthcoming PA 7200 Precision Architecture RISC. The 7200, due to appear at around the same time in a line of servers that will also run Hewlett’s long-promised symmetric multiprocessing Unix, HP-UX 10, will carry the company through to the final pure Precision Architecture iteration, the PA 8000, before its collaboration with Intel Corp on a Very Long Instruction Word successor to both iAPX-86 and Precision Architecture kicks in. Hewlett had often railed against symmetric multiprocessing on the desktop, claiming that neither the market, nor symmetric multiprocessing application software were ready. But the company now sees demand for virtual reality-type applications that can be readily addressed by symmetric multiprocessing desktop machines.
