NEC Corp this week rattled the supercomputer community by announcing the SX-3 family and claiming peak performance of 22 GFLOPS for the top model – but the machine has not been built yet, and is not due to ship until the fourth quarter of 1990. The claimed speed is about 25% higher than the design speed of Cray Research Inc’s forthcoming Cray-3, but observers doubt the NEC machine could ever achieve that speed on real work. NEC’s SX family has so far attracted only 180 applications, against more than 600 for Cray machines, and in an effort to tap a base of applications, NEC will run the machine under a version of Unix that it calls Super-UX. The machine will come in four uniprocessor, two dual and two four processor models, and the scalar performance of the top model is put at 680 MIPS. Memory will go from 64Mb to 2Gb and the clock is set at under 3nS, using NEC’s bipolar Current Mode Logic with 20,000 gate arrays that switch at 70pS. The machines will be marketed in the US by HNSX Supercomputers Inc, a 50-50 joint venture of NEC Corp and Honeywell Inc. Prices have been set at $5m for the 700 MFLOPS version to $23m for the top model. NEC hopes to sell 120 over four years, but it has so far sold only 23 of all its SX models.
