Davin Computer Corp, the Irvine, California company formed by Computer Automation Inc founder David Methvin to build super-high-performance 64-bit minicomputers, was showing its long delayed BAT 6420 last week at the Systems/USA trade show held in San Jose. Davin claims that the 6420 contains the first new complex instruction set computer processor to appear on the market for 15 years. CISC has had a bad press of late, but the RISC people are comparing their chips with old technology. The Davin full 64-bit chip provides the equivalent of 32 MIPS peak performance in a single processor configuration, and uses over 750 variable length instructions in its 112-bit microcode engine, so that instruction fetch, procedure call and run-time operations are reduced by a factor of eight or more. There is an optional 64-bit floating point co-processor, a 50Mbytes-per-second Bat Bus communications channel for the con nection of fast peripherals, and a choice of operating system: Unix System V or Davin’s own DARTS real- time system. The result is a low price tag of $13,670 for unit quan tities, down to $9,982 for quanti ties of 100. Davin has been grant ed patents on two of its applicati ons relating to the design of the machine, and that patents are still pending on the remaining two. The Davin president reckons that one of the patents could have important implications for the computer ind ustry, one called parallel byte processing in a single processor, which he reckons is applicable to all 32-bit commercial computers and the second patent covers the Auto matic Data Channels built into all Davin processors and Methvin says that vastly improves the number of personal computer stations handled.
