NCR Corp has shed a little light on the aim of its joint venture with Teradata Corp announced last week (CI No 1,358). An NCR spokesman said that the company would pull the essence out of the Teradata technology to produce a range of scalable, general purpose systems using a client-server approach and merchant microprocessors from Intel Corp. It might take a few years, he added. NCR will soon need to give its current multi-processor technology a boost: top-end Tower Systems, such as the 32/850, use a master-slave architecture which is looking increasingly old-fashioned, and which is now generally acknowledged to be less efficient than the shared memory symmetrical multi-processing architectures used by most of NCR’s competitors – and Unix International recently endorsed that approach as the basis for its proposed Unix multi-processing standard at UniForum in February. NCR’s top brass is due to turn out to make a statement of direction on its Open Computing platform strategy later today.
