Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!mcdchg!wucs1!wucs2!sw1e!uusgth From: uusgth@sw1e.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: new Gould NPL Message-ID: <501@sw1e.UUCP> Date: Fri, 27-Mar-87 02:03:14 EST Article-I.D.: sw1e.501 Posted: Fri Mar 27 02:03:14 1987 Date-Received: Wed, 1-Apr-87 06:49:46 EST Organization: Southwestern Bell Telco GHQ St. Louis, MO Lines: 64 Keywords: gould supermini On Wednesday, March 25, Gould, Inc. announced via world-wide satellite down-link the first of their new super -minicomputers, the NP1. The NP1 is the first of a new architecture from Gould, called the NPL series, that brings ultra-high performance to minicomputers at price performance factors well below the current industry. The NP1 is an ECL, gate-array processor sitting on a very fast bus (154 megabytes per second). With 2 cpu's on the same bus, coupled with a math accelerator unit, it does 12 MIPS sustained at a base price of about $400,000. With a multiple, coupled bus option, 8 cpu's can co-exist for close to 100 MIPS, addressing 2 gigabytes of 54 nanosec memory. A more apt description for this "fire-breather", as Gould likes to call their computers, is "mini-supercomputer". Indeed, the new NP1 has a special link that allows 100 megabytes/second access to a Cray. All this sitting in a fairly-rugged standard air-cooled cabinet not much bigger than a large filing cabinet. Of course, being the "old battery" company that Gould is, you can hang as much un- interruptible battery power on it as you want; and it has a built-in micro-processor for environmental control. Unix is THE operating system, complete with Bell, Berkeley, and the real-time extensions that Gould has pioneered in the real-time world. A full complement of network connectivity, compilers for all the major languages, and a VME bus offer users almost anything they could ever want. Gould is betting their entire Computer Systems division on this architecture; expecting the NPL line to be 20% of their 1988 revenues, and then the majority of their business in the 1990's. It should be interesting indeed to watch this development vs. HP's similar full-scale jump into RISC architecture (Gould's new line is not RISC); not to forget the parallel process architectures coming on soon. While it's too early to see if it's RISC or no risk, or both, one thing is clear, we are seeing 3 major developments here. One, Unix is becoming an industry standard; two, real-time Unix is here; and three, price per MIP is dropping exponentially. Probably, the only thing holding back such beasts from eating mainframes alive in the commercial market is that the secondary hardware markets (i.e. fast drives; higher-speed access methods, such as fiber WANS; and robotized cartridge handling; etc.) and software markets (expert systems; improved database file structures; and standardized window interfaces) just haven't kept up with the fast moving central processor technology. So what's new ! The opinions above are the author's alone; any similarity to management, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Tom Helton Support Group ..{ihnp4}! | | |\ | | \/ Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. sw1e!uusgth |_| | \| | /\ One Bell Ctr 24W5, StL, MO 63101 -- Tom Helton Support Group ..{ihnp4}! | | |\ | | \/ Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. sw1e!uusgth |_| | \| | /\ One Bell Ctr 24W5, StL, MO 63101