Mitsubishi Electric Corp is said to be looking to the second source agreement with Digital Equipment Corp on the Alpha RISC to build a new base for its semiconductor business: the company gave up manufacturing its own mainframe and mid-range computers several years ago, in favour of selling IBM Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co machines on an OEM basis, and focusing its strategy on client-server systems, where it was assisted by its purchase of the Apricot Comoputers Ltd hardware division – but Apricot insists that it is 100% wedded to the Intel Corp iAPX-86 architecture and has no plans to build Alpha machines, although if the instruction comes in from Tokyo, it won’t have much option; there is an element of two-timing in Mitsubishi Electric signing up with DEC because it is already a member of the Hewlett-Packard Precision RISC Organisation.
