NeuralWare Inc, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has introduced two neural network development workstations in Sparc and MS-DOS personal computer configurations. Both have been designed to run its NeuralWorks Professional II/Plus software, which is bundled with the SuperStations. They’re targeted at neural network application developers in process control, financial modelling and risk management, especially within the defence, oil and gas industries. The SuperStation/Sparc is essentially a Sparcstation 2 from Sun Microsystems Inc with Sky Computers Inc’s 40MHz Intel 80860 Skybolt board added-in. With 32Mb RAM, 414Mb disk, floppy drive, SCSI, Ethernet, serial and SBus slots, the 28.5 MIPS box is claimed to outperform IBM’s equivalent RS/6000 model by four times. The SuperStation/PC is a 33MHz Intel 80486 machine with 8Mb RAM and 200Mb disk: it also includes a 40MHz Intel 80860 board, which itself comes with 16Mb RAM. The SuperStations are due in September: the Sparc machine is priced at $60,000, the MS-DOS version costs $30,000. Initially they are available only in the US, though NeuralWare distributes its software products through Burgess Hill, Sussex-based Scientific Computers Ltd in the UK. NeuralWare President Sean Riley says the firm is currently in negotiations with Sun and its other hardware suppliers about distributing the machines in Europe where it is prohibited from doing so by Sun and others at the moment. The company has also released a version of its software for Digital Equipment Corp’s Ultrix 4.0: it costs $4,000.
