In a surprise move, NEC Corp has approached Convex Computer Corp and proposed that it market the Convex C3 minisupercomputers in Japan to plug the gap below its own SX3 supercomputers. Despite NEC’s adherence to the MIPS Technologies Inc R-series RISC, which it fabricates, the move seems to move NEC inexorably towards the Hewlett-Packard Co Precision Architecture RISC camp, because Convex plans to use the part in forthcoming parallel machines, and NEC already markets the Stratus Computer Inc fault-tolerant machines in Japan – having chosen the ill-starred Intel Corp 80860 as the basis of its first generation of RISC machines, Stratus plans to use Precision Architecture RISCs in future iterations of its systems.
