Tadpole switches Sparc sources; designs in ISDN, PCMCIA

Electronic News, Feb 21, 1994 by Reinhardt Krause

Noting that Mips' licensees are pushing the performance of that RISC architecture faster than Sun's Sparc partners, Mr. Burr said Tadpole was free to evaluate other processor architectures that could support Unix. However, Sun is also Tadpole's largest customer. Mr. Burr said that working with the AIX environment through IBM also opens up new possibilities.

Mr. Burr contends that the SparcBook 3 is very cost competitive in several respects. Although priced at a more than 20 percent premium over Sun's SparcStation LX, Mr. Burr believes the SparcBook 3 will still win some business as both a desktop and portable.

In addition, he said that the pricing for Intel-based portables tends to be perhaps twice as high as for desktop models using similar processors and the systems generally use the ISA bus. There is a migratiwn to the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus, though, he noted.