Control Data Corp yesterday announced its white hope for the future, its new top-end Cyber 2000 mainframe, and also revealed that it has joined the growing crowd cutting a path to the Sunnyvale, California door of MIPS Computer Systems Inc, signing an agreement for joint development of an applications-specific RISC-based computer. The new air-cooled ECL gate array-based Cyber 2000 is rated at twice the power of the Cyber 990 and is described as combining the attributes of a mainframe and a supercomputer: the chips are also claimed to be the densest ECL in the industry at 14,000 gates per chip. The machine includes separate instruction and data caches with racy 5nS access times. Running the 100×100 Linpack benchmark, the Cyber 2000 is claimed to perform at 30 MFLOPS against 38 MFLOPS for the Cray-2 on the same benchmark. Claimed peak performance on the Cyber 2000 is 220 MFLOPS per processor, and the machine’s channels run at 25 megabytes per second. Offered in a 2000S scalar version upgradable to the 2000V vector model, the machine comes with one or two processors, and will ship late next year. No prices were given. The company also announced the Disk Array Subsystem, which stores 32Gb and a transfer rate of 16.7Mbytes-per-second, usable with all its mainframes; the serial version ships in June, the parallel version fourth quarter.
