People patiently attending the long-awaited fault-tolerant Unix machine being built by Toshiba Corp around the Sparc RISC with Sequoia Systems Inc’s fault-tolerant technology are going to have to wait a good while longer yet – and when it arrives, it won’t be built around the Sparc but around the PowerPC. The two companies announced the switch and warned that first customer shipment of the new product is expected to be more than a year later than the Sparc version would have been. The product, if it ever arrives, will be jointly owned by Toshiba and Sequoia and be available for manufacture and sale by both companies: Toshiba will market the product in Japan and Marlborough, Massachusetts-based Sequoia has marketing rights for the rest of the world. Putting the boot in hard to the Sparc camp, Sequoia says the PowerPC system is expected to be faster and more scalable than the Sparc version would have been, and to be more competitive over the long-term. Sequoia currently still builds its machines around the Motorola Inc 68000 family, selling them direct and through OEM partner Hewlett-Packard Co, which offers them as the HP 9000 Series 1200 line. Samsung Electronics Co is another licensee, building a low-end 68040-based machine that is marketed by both itself and Sequoia – and the latter is also in process of acquiring Digital Equipment Corp’s fault-tolerant Alpha RISC effort and plans to complete development of that line and bring it to market as well. Any plans for a fault-tolerant Precision Architecture machines from Sequoia and Hewlett appear to have died.
