HP: PRO small but effective

Electronic News, March 30, 1992

NEW YORK -- Making a virtue of necessity, Hewlett-Packard Co. officials last week sought to characterize the nine founding members of its new Precision RISC Organization as a small but elite group of companies that would wield disproportionate power in establishing the RISC architecture in applications ranging from appliances to supercomputers.

Given HP's recent success in winning over MIPS Computer licensee Convex Computer to its Precision Architecture RISC platform, industry speculation had been intense on whether new converts would be revealed at the PRO introduction. But there were no such surprises, and HP officials declined to comment on a recent report that Control Data Corp. might now be rethinking its commitment to MIPS Computer architecture (EN, March 9 and March 23).

Besides HP and Convex, founding members include Hitachi Ltd., Hughes Aircraft Co., Mitsubishi Electric Corp., Oki Electric Industry Co. Ltd., Prime Computer Inc., Sequoia Systems and Yokogawa Electric Corp.

The list did not include all of HP's PA-RISC allies, with companies such as Samsung Electronics absent from the list, but Willem Roelandts, vice president and general manager of HP's Networked Systems group, said additional members would be announced in a matter of weeks. And the HP official appointed to head PRO as president, Jim Bell, said the firm would disclose "a very small number of semiconductor partners" later this year.

HP officials lost no opportunities in pointing to what they claim is the spotty record so far of such other RISC alliances as Sun's Sparc International consortium and the Advanced Computing Environment built around the MIPS architecture. "All of them are in trouble," Mr. Roelandts declared. "Some of them are falling apart. Others, though they have hundreds of members, have

Eventually, though, Mr. Freund expects more than 90 percent of the Apollo base to shift to RISC platforms. The importance of the issue to HP can be measured by the size of that base; Mr. Freund would not disclose specific figures, but said the split between installed Domain/OS and HP-UX units is still "in the 50-50 ballpark" despite the rapid growth of the Series 700 RISC models, which run only HP-UX.

The first board upgrade to the RISC line, scheduled to become available this summer, would enable the Series 400 Model 425e to be converted into the low-end Model 710 RISC machine. Upgrades for additional Series 400 systems are scheduled to follow in early 1993.

The upgrades would likely cost $6,000 to $8,000 and require only the CPU swap and a change to HP-UX by Domain/OS users, although Mr. Freund noted that the RISC systems could also need more memory in some cases.

The difficulty of porting from Domain/OS to HP-UX would vary, he said, with customers using the proprietary Aegis portion of Domain/OS likely to have "more of a conversion effort than people on the Unix side."

Also, while HP will simply switch the operating system license to HP-UX for customers under maintenance contracts, it's unclear what policy application vendors will follow for their licenses. HP is "working very actively with ISVs to help on that front," Mr. Freund said.

The board upgrades would augment the current trade-in program, under which the company gives credits to customers switching from Motorola-based systems to Series 700 models. That program covers older models besides the Series 400 and will remain in place, HP indicated.