One reason that Stardent Inc may have been surprisingly sanguine about transferring future development rights to its MIPS Computer Systems Inc RISC-based graphics workstations to its biggest investor, Kubota Corp is that its own interests now lie in another direction: the Newton, Massachusetts company is designing its next generation of machines around the Intel 80860 RISC, with a launch target of sometime next year; meantime Electronic News reports that the first shipments of the R3000-based Stardent 500, which uses the 80860 as a co-processor, have been held up two or three weeks in order to fix a software bug or two.
