The oft-heralded supporters club for Hewlett-Packard Co’s Precision Architecture RISC processor, finally has an official launch date, March 24. Expect Samsung Electronics Co, Hitachi Ltd and Sequoia Systems Inc, the companies already pledged to the chip, to be there, with a few others – Mitsubishi Electric Corp has been mentioned. Hewlett-Packard is going the Sparc International route with what is expected to be called Precision RISC Organisation, PRO, setting up a separate entity with its own director and various levels of membership to accommodate prospects like software houses. Unlike Sparc International, Hewlett-Packard maintains that it does not want a bunch of companies building clones of its machines, and will limit principal membership to around a dozen firms, all implementing Precision Architecture RISC in different segments of the market. Meantime Sequoia is sitting about as pretty as any small hopeful company could wish as a result of its agreement on fault-tolerant Unix machines with Hewlett: according to Electronic News, the Palo Alto company expects shipments of Sequoia machines to rise sharply this year as customers move beyond the software development and pilot project stage on the machines. Hewlett-Packard is looking for sales of what it calls the HP 9000 Series 1200 line to increase five-fold by the first or second quarter of 1993 and says it has no plans to develop its own fault-tolerant machines and will rely on Sequoia indefinitely; Sequoia Precision Architecture RISC models are now expected to be ready next year.
