Mitsubishi drops Alpha support
By Andy Santoni
InfoWorld Electric
Posted at 2:56 PM PT, Jul 9, 1998
Mitsubishi Electric, the third member of the AlphaPowered alliance along with Digital and Samsung, has dropped manufacturing and marketing of its low-cost Alpha CPU, blaming in part the Asian financial crisis.
Mitsubishi thought the Alpha processor would become a mass-market CPU, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Dataquest, in San Jose, Calif. While Digital (now Compaq) and Samsung continued development of the 21164 and higher-performance 21264 Alpha chips, Mitsubishi had concentrated on the 21164PC version.
"Samsung has been very aggressive with Alpha," Brookwood said. "They have become true believers."
In contrast, "Mitsubishi never was a major factor," Brookwood noted.
The 21164PC, co-designed by Digital and Mitsubishi, aimed to enable desktop PCs with Alpha performance and a price of less than $2,600. (See "Digital targets mainstream NT desktops.") It was the first Alpha product to be marketed and sold by all three companies.
The AlphaPowered Web site (http://www.alphapowered.com), which once boasted all three company logos, notes it was "designed and developed by Digital Information Design," and is now "sponsored by Alpha Processor Inc." It no longer carries the Mitsubishi name.
"Although Mitsubishi Electric has participated with Digital Equipment Corp. in the joint development of the Alpha processor, in light of the current severe business environment facing our company, we have frozen all of our Alpha operations as part of a restructuring effort," said a Mitsubishi representative. "Together with the suspension of all production and sales activities relating to the M3D21164PC, Mitsubishi Electric has also refrained from making new investments in this area."
"There were no outside factors influencing our decision," the Mitsubishi executive continued. "Neither the Compaq/DEC agreement nor the recent launching of Alpha Processor Inc. were considerations in our decision."
"Although we have frozen our Alpha projects, this does not mean that we are going to completely give up all operations in this field," the Mitsubishi executive added. "Our licenses with DEC are still valid."
Samsung, for its part, last month formed Alpha Processor as an independent company to market the Alpha architecture. Compaq and Microsoft announced that they support the mission and strategy of the new company.
|
