Ferranti Plc has unveiled the next generation of its FM1600 family of naval minicomputers as the F2420E. The new machine offers five times the power of the FM1600E, and will be offered as a direct upgrade in a variety of naval weapon and control programmes. The CPU implements an enhanced version of the 24 bit, three address F1600 instruction code and comes in single or dual processor configurations, each CPU having a 128Kb cache. Main memory goes to 1M-word, and the address range is 1M-word for instruction code, 8M-words all told. The first pre-production F2420 is available to ship to GEC-Marconi for integration into Sea Wolf anti-missile radars, six weeks ahead of schedule.
