Sun Microsystems Inc is denying – although less than vehemently since the tale reflects badly on a competitor – a tale that went out on the Comline Japanese news wire overnight on Monday saying that Hitachi Ltd has an agreement with Sun Microsystems Inc for development and production of the UltraSparc II 64-bit RISC: Hitachi has of course been Hewlett-Packard Co’s big RISC win in Japan for Precision Architecture, but according to the news agency decided to go with Sun because it saw a technological advantage; last year, Hitachi announced its Osiris Superserver, a mainframe running OSF/1 Unix combined with a network server and chose a Sparc system rather than going with Precision Architecture (CI No 2,144), and there have been suggestions that it was not committed to the Hewlett RISC for a forthcoming parallel machine, although at that time it was said to be mulling PowerPC; since the story has been denied by Sun, it has to be assumed to be a piece of characteristic Japanese kite-flying intended to jog the arm of one of the other companies with which Hitachi is negotiating on RISC, likely Hewlett-Packard, to persuade it into new concessions.
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