Backing its conviction that the remaining large-scale mainframe users are going to want the most powerful monolithic machines possible, Hitachi Ltd yesterday unveiled its next-generation IBMulator, which was launched by its 80%-owned Hitachi Data Systems unit as the HDS Skyline Series. The new generation of mainframes is claimed to run at twice the speed of current models – in fact uniprocessor performance appears to be a little over 60% greater than IBM’s biggest current uniprocessor – while occupying less than half the floor space. The power consumption and cooling costs per unit of performance are cut by more than 70%, the company claims. It quotes Gartner Group as saying that the new system operates at up to 780 MIPS, depending on operating system, application workload, software and hardware configurations, and usage. The machine is built in a variant of BiCMOS that the company calls ACE, saying it combines discrete ECL and CMOS circuit elements within a lattice on the same chip. The technology is claimed to have made possible a 13-to-one reduction in components per instruction processor compared with current systems. The company is offering the machines in 10 models, the largest being an eight-way multiprocessor; first shipments are planned for the fourth quarter this year.
