Following the example of Toshiba Corp and NEC Corp, MIPS Computer Systems Inc says it is lining up a European semiconductor house to provide ASIC chip sets for the instant Advanced Computing Environment’s Advanced RISC Computing kit including CPU, memory interfaces, on-board input-output, video and EISA bus connections – that it will be marketing to ACE members. MIPS has been talking with a European partner for the last three weeks, according to Peter Adams, European business manager for technology products, and a US fabricator may also be enticed to sign on. It’s the large personal computer manufacturers that are expected to sign up for the equipment, says MIPS, (those that want an ACE RISC offering but haven’t got the research and development capability, or the inclination, to do it for themselves) and then it will be worth the licence fee only if they expect to manufacture over 5,000 systems; otherwise, they’ll probably just take board-level products from MIPS, which will ship from the end of the first quarter. In the UK, total fee per system, based on a shipment of 25,000 ARC boxes, ranges from UKP23 to UKP34.
