Having belatedly decided to enter the RISC wars with its Spectrum Precision Architecture, Hewlett-Packard Co is making up for lost time by following up its agreement for high-end RISCs with Hitachi Ltd with another for mass market with Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, Seoul, South Korea. Under the agreement, Samsung will develop, manufacture and resell chip sets, workstations and other computers using the Spectrum RISC-based. This time, Hewlett is licensing both the design and its submicron CMOS process technology to Samsung, and the two will co-develop and Samsung will manufacture RISC chip sets that use fewer parts than current sets and Samsung will be licensed to sell the sets to both Hewlett and third-party manufacturers and will incorporate them into future computers of its own. Hewlett will also buy finished low-end workstations OEM from Samsung, each company marketing the machines under its own name. Samsung may also develop other RISC-based workstations complementary to the Hewlett line, and Samsung also gets remarketing rights to Hewlett’s HP-UX Unix before both move on to the forthcoming OSF/1 version of Unix. Hewlett chose Samsung Electronics, the $4,500m subsidiary of the $30,000m-a-year Samsung Group for its low-cost systems and semiconductor manufacturing capabilities, and its presence in key world markets. The new $5,000 workstations will challenge the Sun Microsystems Sparcstations, low-end Sparc-based machines to be made by Toshiba Corp and Taiwanese companies, and DEC’s MIPStations, bringing Unix right down into Microsoft OS/2 territory.
