Unisys drops 88000 RISC effort, will stress Intel x86 CISC MPUs

Electronic News, Dec 23, 1991 by Gerry Khermouch

At the low end, it now seems likely that Unisys will exit the manufacturing of Intel-based boxes altogether, in favor of one or more OEM arrangements. While officials insisted last week that no final decisions have been made on the matter, in disclosing the Flemington shutdown the company noted that Unisys' "engineering and manufacturing resources will be focused on high-end Intel-based workstations for the corporate desktop ... with low-end workstations coming from OEM sources."

Mid-range units, including 486-based machines and some multiprocessors, will be manufactured by Unisys at its San Jose operation, where production from Flemington also is being consolidated.

At the high end of the Unix range, the company will continue to rely on its three-year OEM partner Sequent -- at least for the next couple of years, the period covered by the contract renewal. Last spring, when Unisys introduced the first multiprocessor U6000 machine that it would be building itself, there was some speculation that the Sequent relationship might be terminated, view that seemed to receive further support when Sequent said it would sharply reduce its OEM activities (EN, April 15 and July 8).

But Mr. Bell said that, for now at least, there is no thought to ending the relationship. "From my perspective, there needs to be an ongoing evaluation of our development efforts, but in the higher-performance area, I still think we'll need them" in two years, when he latest contract expires.

A spokesman for Sequent, which supplies computers linking as many as 30 Intel MPUs to Unisys' U6000 line, pegged the value of the contract renewal at between $20 million and $40 million. He said that while Unisys would remain the firm's largest customer, it is expected to account for less than 10 percent of total sales, in contrast to nearly 30 percent last year.

Unisys officials said they won't completely abandon the use of RISC machines, which are likely to fill a few niche applications. Besides shipping the 88000-based workstations to Japan, Unisys also OEM's Sprac-based Solbourne machines for geophysical applications in Europe.

The shift also spells the final exit within Unisys for Motorola's 680x0 family of CISC chips. An OEM agreement with Arix for the 020-based U5000 line was canceled last year, and Mr. Bell said the S series of 040-based machines "is now in the process of converging" with the Intel lines. Current customers will be supported.

Analysts said the formal commitment to Intel wasn't entirely a surprise, given the weakened prospects of the 88000 in light of the IBM-Apple RISC collaboration, as well as changes in the executive suites at Unisys.

They pointed not only to the departure of Mr. Chen, but also to the ascension of Hugh I. Lynch, a former NCR official who joined Unisys in December, 1990, and this spring was named Cyril Yansouni's successor as president of the Computer Systems Product group, which includes the Unix Systems group (EN, May 20). Mr. Lynch has been identified with NCR's strategy to base all its open-systems machines, from notebooks to massively parallel machines, on Intel MPUs.