Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA’s two-year old OEM deal with Digital Equipment Corp may be running into trouble according to a the Wall Street Journal. DEC is to cease buying Olivetti portable personal computers for resale from September, in preparation for building its own portables, while sales of Alpha machines by Olivetti are said to be way below the levels expected. Meanwhile, Olivetti has introduced two more workstations in its LSX 7300 line of re-badged DEC machines: the LSX 7370 and 7390, running OSF/1 Unix and using the Alpha AXP EV45 chip. The LSX 7370 is an enhanced version of the existing 7360 running at 225MHz instead of 175MHz. The LSX 7390 is an enhanced version of the 7380, with clock speed boosted from 200MHz to 275MHz. The new workstations join the LSX 7300 workstation, LSX7500 and LSX 7700 server lines and the R7-600 low-end workstation/server line, all Alpha systems. They are available in Italy or France, but not in the UK, where Olivetti concentrates on the LSX 7500 running NT or OSF/1, with up to four processors. This gives it an NT offering for financial and retail customers, but does not clash with the LSX 5050 Pentium quad processor, or the top-end Pyramid Technology Corp-sourced LSX 6500 range.
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