Microsoft Corp and Intel Corp will lead a charge against the RISC Unix crowd at next month’s Workstation Leadership Forum in Seattle. It’s seen as something of a coming out party by the NT workstation community. Bill Gates and Intel president Craig Barrett will describe plans for workstations using Windows NT 5.0. Received wisdom from NT workstation vendors suggests Pentium II has resolved performance issues and Unix is within striking distance of all but the very high-end requirements. That’s why, they say, say the ECAD folks are the last to move their applications from Unix – virtually all of the MCAD crowd have NT applications available – not wanting to kill the golden goose. NEC Corp only sells its NT workstations in Japan. It’s yet to be determined whether NEC will go direct to the US market over and above its Packard-Bell NEC unit, but if it does it will have to buy or build a channel to deliver products. NEC’s newest Deschutes box incorporates a new NEC graphics accelerator called TEV3.
