Sequent Computer Systems Inc has hung a December 3 shipment date on its ccNUMA-Q-based systems, with deliverables shaping up as 16 CPU affairs initially with 32- way versions to follow in the first quarter of 1997. The Beaverton, Oregon-based company’s ccNUMA cache- coherent Non Uniform Memory Access system is currently six weeks away from going out to software partners, after which Sequent says it will freeze the NUMA-Q recipe. It has what were originally 46 separate projects up and running and claims it will beat fellow ccNUMA journeyman Data General Corp to general delivery. From what it hears, Data General has yet to turn its first system on. Sequent is talking up its own NUMA-Q architecture over Digital Equipment Corp’s TruClustering, Hewlett-Packard Co’s Convex SPP buy-in and Sun Microsystems Inc’s Cache-Only Memory Architecture variant. Sequent reckons the key to its success lies in the fact that its existing symmetric multiprocessing nodes will not require any changes to take advantage of NUMA-Q – they will perform at 80% of peak performance once hooked into the switch. It concedes however that tweaking software will optimize performance. Cache misses will be pushed over the 500Mb per second, two microsecond latency IQ-Link by the Vitesse Semiconductor Corp-Sequent Gallium Arsenide chip set. Sequent is re-engineering Intel Corp’s Standard High Volume Pentium Pro quad boards after concluding Intel’s use of commodity personal computer parts and techniques is not suitable for enterprise data center systems. Although it concedes that Intel has got the message, it thinks that companies using the plain unvarnished boards such as Data General will still encounter problems at the high end.