NEC Corp yesterday trounced the IBM-compatible mainframe world and gave the Bull SA camp a warm feeling by announcing what it claims is the world’s fastest mainframe – a one-to-six processor behemoth that it says delivers 500 MIPS in maximum configuration. The Acos 3800 machine, which no doubt will in due course be offered as the successor to the top-end Bull DPS 9000 for Bull GCOS 8 users, is claimed to offer 3.8 times the performance of that machine, which NEC calls the Acos 2000, and NEC also reckons it is twice as fast as the new Hitachi M-880. The Acos 3800 comes in seven models with from one to six processors; ships of the uniprocessor to quad processor models are set for the second quarter 1991, with the five- and six-CPU models one quarter later. NEC is hoping to sell 200 of them over the next five years.
