There has been a suspicion that there was more that met the eye in the IBM Corp-Hitachi Ltd announcement on April 27 (CI No 2,404), and today, Hitachi Ltd will flesh out its mainframe and Power/PowerPC plans in more detail – and it says that it expects IBM to announce within the next three months that it will take Hitachi’s next generation monolithic mainframe processor on an OEM basis. In addition to taking IBM’s new CMOS 390 processors in single and parallel processor configurations, Hitachi is developing a Summit series follow-on machine it is calling the S/390 Classic that will employ a Hitachi-designed CPU with bipolar ECL and CMOS techniques implemented on the same chip. The company says it will offer twice the performance of the current Hitachi Data Systems GX 8000 uniprocessor and multiprocessors – a single image system will support up to 16 CPUs – and will run MVS and Hitachi’s Hi-OSF/1 Unix. It is due within two years. Other plans include parallel systems built around its own implementation of a 200MHz version of IBM’s Power multi-chip RISC in 1996, and PowerPC and Hewlett-Packard Co Precision Architecture RISC-based workstations and servers.
