Digital Equipment Corp’s second source, the electronic device group of Mitsubishi Electric Corp’s Mitsubishi Electronics America Inc, has produced its first Alpha offering, the M36066A, which is functionally identical to Digital Equipment Corp’s 21066A, also unveiled last week. Both companies have joined forces on 100MHz and 233MHz parts fabricated to 0.5 micron line rules, achieving 94 SPECint92 and 110 SPECfp92. DEC will sample the embedded Peripheral Component Interconnect part this quarter and ship it from the first quarter of next year at from $175 for the 100MHz part and $360 for the 233MHz iteration in quantities of 5,000 and above. Mitsubishi will not have engineering samples until the first quarter, with commercial samples set for July and volume deliveries of over 1,000 units in September from $490. DEC says the integrated part will go into its embedded AXPvme VMEbus boards, Prime Option print engines, the Alpha Data Parallel Systems Ltd accelerators, Alta Technology Inc Asynchronous Transfer Mode boards, and NekoTech’s Mach 1 Windows NT desktops. Mitsubishi says that its part will run all the same operating systems – OSF/1, Windows NT, OpenVMS and VxWorks – plus NetWare. Why Mitsubishi’s implementation is later than DEC’s or whether it shares the same die size are unclear, as the two company did not respond to questions.
