Eagan, Minnesota-based Cray Research Inc has introduced a new Y-MP M90 series of supercomputers, claiming that they offer the largest main memories ever, in the hope that they make it possible to solve important scientific and engineering problems that are too large for the memory of any existing computer system to handle efficiently. It is looking for customers in the petroleum, automotive, aerospace and chemical industries and in large-scale environmental and long-range weather modelling.There are three models – M92 with two CPUs, M94 with four and M98 with up to eight, the last coming with up to 4G-words of 64 bits, 32Gb, using 16M-bit memory chips with up to 17.1G bytes-per-second memory bandwidth and 11.7G bytes-per-second input-output throughput. No word on who is supplying the memory chips. AT&T Co’s Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey has ordered a Y-MP M92 for installation in late 1992 for integrated circuit design, physics, chemistry, numerical methods and speech processing. Pricing for the Y-MP M98 starts under $10m where three years ago, eight-processor Cray supercomputers started at over $23m. It has also cut prices on its existing Y-MP 2E, 4E, 8I and 8E by 5% to 30%.
