Unisys Corp reckons that it has IBM’s 9021s in a hammerlock with the new A19 mainframe, announced yesterday, offering the only air-cooled machine in its class. It says that dense circuit technology and newly-patented packaging and air cooling techniques mean the A19 takes up a quarter the space of a comparable 9021, and that power and cooling costs will average 30% of those for the IBM box. It has a superscalar architecture with instructions handled according to resource availability rather than the sequence submitted – and approach three to five years ahead of the industry, says Gartner Group. The uniprocessor is 1.8 times the power of the A16-61E which has the current top rating of 272.5 transactions per second on the TPC-A benchmark. Bottom to top A power range is now 480 times. It incorporates new approaches to fault diagnosis, self-healing maintenance and systems resiliency. Shipping in the third quarter in US, the A19 comes in one- to six-processor configurations; it is from $5.38m to $26m.
