MIPS Computer Systems Inc, one of the companies that shut down most of its Silicon Valley operations for the July 4 week (CI No 1,708), is having to draw in its horns in face of the grinding computer industry recession, and Electronic News hears that the company has abandoned a pair of high-end server development projects – one to build a machine around its next generation ECL RISC, code-named Paragon, the other, the MX programme to do a four-processor R4000 machine. The ECL R6000 RISCs from Bipolar Integrated Technology Inc have proved troublesome, and the company is likely to get comparable performance to the existing R6000s used in the RC6260 and RC6280 from the new R4000 CMOS part. The paper suggests that the company now wants to devote a large proportion of its research and development dollars to the Advanced Computing Environment effort.
