Intel beams up to ICL's enterprise

ICL's enterprise hardware will use Intel processors from next year, replacing the bespoke CMOS, Mips and Sparc chips that drive the manufacturer's high-end systems.

The company has bet on Intel to extend the dominance it has in the desktop chip market into the enterprise market. ICL is confident that its Open VME environment customers will approve of the change.

The processor change affects ICL's SX, DX, Nile and Goldrush ranges, which sell almost exclusively direct and through other ICL divisions.

They will be replaced next year by lines code-named SY, LY, DY and Award, which will also run Unixware and Windows NT.

Alastair Macintosh, business manager at ICL high-performance systems, said that the switch to Intel P6-based and SMP systems should attract a greater number of ISVs to ICL Series 39 hardware.

'Our offering has been technically excellent but it was not attractive to ISVs as there was not enough volume,' he said. 'Now we are addressing that.'