With backing – including 30 seconded engineers, from its Japanese partner steelmaker Nippon Kokan KK, which has a string of real-time software applications, Convex Computer Corp has come out with a pair of real-time minisupercomputers, the Preemptor 5300 and 5500, derived from its C-2 and C-3 processors. The 5300 comes with one or two CPUs, the 5500 with up to eight, and are implemented in BiCMOS and GaAS arrays. Features specific to the 5000 Series are internal real time clock, user-programmable interval timers, and provisions for sending timer output signals to the outside world in response to external events and to conditions determined by the processor. The company has also gone back to first principles on the software and developed its own fully pre-emptive, fully interruptible real-time kernel because it decided that this would be much more efficient than adding real-time extensions to ConvexOS. The ConvexRTS suite comprises the RTS/rtk kernel; RTS/uxe time-shared development environment based on ConvexOS and therefore Berkeley Unix 4.2- and 4.3-compatible; X Window-based RTS/debugger; and RTS/analyzer. The machines have input-output bandwidth of 200Mbytes per second and Convex rates them at from 50MFLOPS to 800MFLOPS. The 5300 is from $349,000 and is out first quarter 1992, the 5500 from $495,000, one quarter earlier.
