When manufacturers come out with a new generation of mainframes, the pressure is to get the biggest models out first: it will be the power users at the top end that will be most in need of more power – and under most pressure to defect to another manufacturer if its resident supplier can’t come up with the goods. And they are the customers manufacturers most need to hold. Accordingly, when ICL introduced the new high-end Essex processor for Series 39 as the SX family last May, it came out with the 60 MIPS 550-20 and 90 MIPS 580-20 first. Now that those are proven in the field, it is ready to meet the needs of the much larger army of users wanting to upgrade, but to something a little smaller, and has added the 15 MIPS uniprocessor 420-10 and 20 MIPS 450-10, and the 30 MIPS dual processor 480-20 and 40 MIPS 510-20. The new machines effectively supplant the rest of the Series 39 machines that use the original Estriel processor. Prices range from UKP1.2m for the 420-10 to UKP2.9m for the 510-20 claimed to be at least 10% better price-performance than IBM’s Summit models – and ships start next month. They take up one seventh the space, use one sixth the power and dissipate one sixth the heat of IBM’s ES/9000s, ICL claims. The 200Mbps Macrolan 200 optical fibre interface means that the two processors – or nodes – in a multiprocessor can be installed up to 2,000 yards apart yet run under one copy of the VME operating system.
