Prime Computer Inc announced its new 6530 and dual 6550 superminis in the UK yesterday, stressing the fact that the outstanding performance is achieved by use of the new Motorola MCA2500ECL gate arrays, which come with 2,500 gates per chip – it claims to be the first minimaker to move on from the previous MECL100K generation – and from using ECL levels off-chip as well, rather than making the compromise of going to TTL off-chip; Prime also claims to be the first minimaker to do a symmetrical multi-processor implementation of its operating system, for the 6550 dual – but the company was unable to explain its claim that it delivers a full two times the performance of a single processor, where IBM has been doing MP 370s for years and still achieves at very best 1.9 times single processor performance.
