Hitachi Ltd’s commitment to PowerPC is a lot less than overwhelming and its 1994 agreement with IBM Corp was much less of a snub to Hewlett-Packard Co and the Precision Architecture RISC than it appeared at the time. Yesterday, reminding people that it is a sponsor member of the Precision RISC Organization, it announced plans to follow NEC Corp in licensing and reselling Hewlett-Packard workstations, calling them Hitachi 9000 V series. The workstations will be sold and supported by Hitachi primarily in the Japanese market. The company is also offering PA-7100- and PA-7200-based servers, and both will be loaded with the latest versions of HP-UX operating system and use the most recent, powerful processor, the 120MHz PA-7200. It is taking a high-end, mini-tower model and a high-performance desktop model. The Precision Architecture RISC may also find its way into the video server Hitachi is developing under its joint venture agreement with Oracle Corp. Hitachi is developing both the parallel server and set-top boxes and says it has not decided whether it will be using the PowerPC or the Precision Architecture RISC.
