Irvine, California-based Corollary Inc, the company which is behind the multiprocessor 80386 machines that Zenith Data Systems is bidding for the US Air Force AFCAC project, has now announced the technology under the codename ATtack. ATtack, as the name suggests, is designed to be built into 80386-based AT-bus systems to convert them into machines with up to six processors running a modified version of Santa Cruz Operation’s Xenix V. A key feature is a 64Mbytes-per-second, 32-bit wide C-bus connecting the processors and freeing the AT bus for peripheral handling an approach which, when combined with high performance controllers and disk subsystems is said to prevent the AT bus becoming swamped with data. Each CPU board includes 80386 and supports the 80387, has 64Kb cache memory and C-bus interface. The other ATtack hardware components are 16Mb ECC memory and a bridge board linking the C-bus to the AT-bus system. The multiprocessor kernel is claimed to be binary compatible with SCO Xenix. Corollary’s earlier products emerged under the name ATtain and performed similar tricks for 80286 systems, although an upgraded 80386-based version was announced back in February.
