The Hippodrome Club in London’s West End was the venue for the UK launch of Tandem Computers’ new top-end system, the NonStop Cyclone. In a preview of a joint presentation from Cupertino and London taking place today, to be beamed into 110 locations worldwide, Tandem did all but bring out the dancing girls for the machine said to provide all the power of an IBM 3090 – and not the toy 100S model, but a 400S – at less than half the cost. Like the NonStop VLX, the Cyclone is offered with from four to 16 processors with up to four direct memory access input-output channels, and when used in conjunction with the SQL distributed relational database and XL80 or V80 disks, handles mixed workloads of transaction processing, query, and batch. As with the TXP, two generations back, each processor has two instruction pipelines working in parallel which allow up to 16 instructions to travel through simultaneously, and they use superscalar architecture which executes two instructions per clock cycle. The processors can be up to 150 feet apart using Dynabus+ fibre optic buses and fibre optic input-output connections enable storage and communication subsystems to be 300 feet and 1,500 feet distant from the system. The Cyclone uses 1M-bit memory chips with up to 128Mb main memory per processor, and a 16-processor system provides 2Gb. As with the VLX, the custom chips used in the Cyclone were designed by Tandem – in ECL, TTL and CMOS – but this time are being fabricated by Advanced Micro Devices Inc where those for the VLX are made by Motorola. The arithmetic and cache logic are in ECL, the communication bus logic is in TTL, and CMOS is used for storage arrays. Tandem is aiming Cyclone at financial, manufacturing, government, and retail markets, and has a number of test sites including the Union Bank of Finland and Logica Inc. The entry-level 904E costs UKP2m, the 904 is UKP2.7m, the 908 is UKP5m, and the 916 is UKP9.5m. All will be available in the UK from the end of this year. The Cyclone, coupled with a statement that fourth quarter earnings would be in the range of 35 to 40 cents a share against 31 cents last time on turnover up 17% or so at $450m enabled Tandem shares to withstand the early hurricane on Wall Street, and they rose $1.125 at $23.375 against the early trend.
