Fujitsu Ltd yesterday moved to steal IBM’s Summit thunder by launching its next generation top-end mainframe family, the M-1800 Model Group and broke ranks with the rest of the IBM world by being the first to offer an eight-processor configuration. The company claims that the machine is about 10% faster than Hitachi Ltd’s new M-880 and NEC Corp’s Acos 3800 but it is not clear that it is talking about uniprocessor performamnce: the Hitachi machine is currently offered with a maximum of four CPUs. Fujitsu is offering the machine in two-, three-, four-, five-, six- and eight-processor configura tions, with the dyadic and triadic to be available in Japan next Ap ril, the others following in third quarter. The performance claim and the configurations raise the suspi cion that the dual processor model is not a true dual but a uniproces sor in which the instruction stream is split in two and shared between two arithmetic-logic units, and recombined into a single stream before being passed to the input- output subsystem – but that is not confirmed. The things rent for from $507,000 and $1.885m a month, which is seen as cheaper per MIS than the Hitachi machine. Fujitsu looks to sell 300 in three years.
