Japanese manufacturers seem to like to hedge their bets in the RISC market, and so although Toshiba Corp is a major fabricator of MIPS Technologies Inc RISCs, and is one of the largest resellers of Sun Microsystems Inc workstations and servers in Japan, as well as making Sparc-based laptop computers and designing a fault-tolerant Sparc-based machine using a variant of Sequoia Systems Inc’s fault-tolerant Unix System CV, it has been persuaded by IBM Corp to join the PowerPC camp. IBM has granted Toshiba a licence for the PowerPC microprocessors and AIX Unix operating system software, and Toshiba appears to be allowed to do pretty much whatever it wants under the agreement – it can make existing PowerPC parts or design its own variants, but only for its own use. There are no restrictions on how they could use it in the future, said Dan Sullivan, IBM’s programme director of licensing. Toshiba said it plans to use the PowerPC in mid-range systems and says it hopes to complete modifications to its existing systems within the next two years, adding that although it is watching developments in the market, it had no plans to use the PowerPC in personal computers at the moment there had been suggestions that it would be a licensee of Apple Computer Inc’s Mac OS. IBM and Toshiba are 50-50 joint venture owners of the Display Technologies Inc liquid crystal diode display manufacturing company in Japan, and are allied on Flash memory chips. No mention was made in the announcement of Motorola Inc, the other fabricator of the PowerPC, which itself has a big 50-50 joint venture with Toshiba in the shape of Tohoku Semiconductor Corp in Sendai, Japan, which makes dynamic memory chips and low-end 68000 family microprocessors and microcontrollers: it would make sense if microcontroller versions of PowerPC were to be made by this firm, but it was not clear yesterday that Motorola was even aware of the new IBM-Toshiba alliance.
