Commercial Data Servers Inc, formed 18 months and working out of Sunnyvale, California (CI No 2,853), is working on a line of desk-side systems. Computer Data, the latest charge of father of the IBM 360, Dr Gene Amdahl, reckons it will become the first new company to produce a family of IBM-compatible mainframes for more than a decade when later this year it begins beta testing its new low-end System 390 desk-side systems, writes Andrew Lawrence of our sister publication, Computer Business Review. The new system is based around IBM’s P390 desk-side system, which combines a 390 CPU with a personal computer, and will be supplied by IBM to Computer Data Servers on an OEM basis. Computer Data will add a high-speed input-output subsystem providing support for IBM channels, so that mainframe peripherals can be attached alongside high speed SCSI disks. The subsystem will also support Asynchronous Transfer Mode communications. The system will run a choice of IBM’s mainframe operating systems – MVS or VM – as well as Amdahl Corp’s UTS implementation of Unix. Computer Data Servers says it has an agreement with IBM that the software license fees will be at the bottom of IBM’s scale. It envisages that the main market will be among mainframe customers wanting to add cheap, fast departmental power to their System/390 environments. Later systems will be powered by new CMOS processors that are not only expected to be substantially more powerful than competing IBM Corp, Amdahl Corp-Fujitsu Ltd or Hitachi Ltd uniprocessors, but will eventually be supercooled to give them extra performance. The company’s first CMOS microprocessor is being designed to deliver 67 IBM mainframe MIPS – but the design is not finished yet; a more powerful machine, using chip running at minus 50oC, should give about 100 MIPS. A further supercooled system will follow in 1997, which will run at minus 198oC. This will give at least 150 MIPS. The cooling systems are being provided by Superconductor Technologies Inc of Santa Barbara, California, the company formed 10 years ago by Robert Schrieffer, a Nobel prize winner for Physics in 1972.
