MIPS Technologies Inc licensee NEC Corp, which also sells Hewlett-Packard Co PA-RISC servers in Japan, will lead the project to create a single reference version of Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s 64-bit OEM implementation of Summit 3DA Unix for the MIPS RISC. All MIPS ABI Group companies, including MIPS parent Silicon Graphics Inc – which already has 64-bit Irix Unix and was wavering until the last minute – but excluding Concurrent Computer Corp which is getting out of the system-building game, will participate in the Golden Gate project out of NEC’s San Jose premises. NEC will contribute between 25 and 40 engineers, the others – Tandem Computers Inc, Sony Corp, Dansk Data Elektronik A/S and Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG’s Pyramid Technology Inc – between 15 and 20 each. When it is complete, the reference implementation will be turned over to group members for value-added implementations. The project will fold technology back into the 3DA development process under the deal it has with Santa Cruz and Hewlett-Packard. The MIPS ABI Group’s current Unix reference implementation is System V.4.2-based. Golden Gate will feed its work into version 3.0 of the application binary interface specification. Version 2.0 now includes support for a single asynchronous input-output which means that database companies such as Sybase Inc can create a single MIPS Unix implementation rather than separate versions for each of the firm’s asynchronous input-output implementations. The 3.0 offering will also bring the internationalization work of the Japanese Open Computing MIPS Platform group back into its midst.
