NEC Corp is now such a star in workstations in the Japanese market that Sanyo Electric Corp, which had planned to develop its own workstations around the MIPS Computer Systems Inc R-series RISC, has decided instead to work with NEC on R-series workstations and buy the resulting products in OEM, the Nikkei Industrial Daily reports. NEC beat Sony Corp to third place in the Japanese workstation market last year – Sun Microsystems Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co remain one and two. Sanyo has tried to be active in the personal computer market as a member of the Japanese-language AT-compatible AX PC group, but has an almost negligible share within Japan, with most sales coming in OEM from Europe and the US. Meantime NEC has come out with two new models in its SuperServer UP4800 series and three new models in the EWS4800 workstation series. The new UP4800/630 and 620 servers use 60MHz and 50MHz 64-bit R4000 processors respectively, delivering a claimed 110 MIPS and 95 MIPS. The new workstations are Model EWS4800/130LT which has a 1,280 by 1,024 pixel colour Thin Film Transistor screen and performance claimed at 30 MIPS; the EWS4800/350 with a 50MHz CPU and performance of 95 MIPS; and Model EWS4800/215, a desktop entry-level model with a VMEbus expansion slot. NEC plans to use the 75MHz R4000 microprocessor which will be ready soon, in an upgrade board to be released this year. Both servers and workstations use versions of System V.4, which will incorporate the Common Japanese Language Application Binary Interface called OCMP announced last week by Sony and NEC. The new products are priced from at the equivalent of $17,800 to $128,000, including software, and shipments are phased from late this month to early September. NEC is hoping to sell 30,000 units of the five new models over the coming two years.
