In London for a briefing on Scalable Processor Architecture Sparc – development last week, Bill Keating, Sun Microsystems Inc’s director of corporate technology marketing revealed that a second European source for its RISC microprocessor will be announced towards the end of the month. Sun has already signed up Philips NV in the Netherlands to fabricate commercial versions of the part due for delivery next year – the second unnamed manufacturer will be making Sparcs exclusively for the defence industry, based upon military specifications. As far as the competition from IBM with its RS/6000 systems is concerned, Keating revealed that a new super-scalar high-performance version of the Sparcserver currently under development will have the kind of performance that will make IBM think again. Commenting on the wider implications of the Open Software Foundation’s asssumed decision to adopt the Network Computing System-based DEcorum technology for its Distributed Computing Environment, he said that while the Software Foundation’s executive committee had unanimously rejected Network File System, he expects that the rival Unix club will have to offer Sun’s Remote Procedure Call to its members in some form, due to the sheer number of users of the Sun Network File System in the Unix community. Furthermore he believes it inevitable that the two dissimilar Remote Procedure Calls will converge over time.
