IBM’s Bblingen laboratory had one of the hotter properties to be described at the big International Solid State Circuits Conference, putting up a five chip implementation of the basic 370 mainframe architecture designed to be fabricated in the same CMOS technology as is used to make the RS/6000 processor. The set can be driven at up to 50MHz – equivalent to a processor cycle of 20nS – and at that speed is claimed to deliver a rather unlikely 30 MIPS. When Infoworld tackled Luis Arzubi, director of the Essex Junction, Vermont laboratory where test runs of the set have been made, he was contradictory, saying in one breath that the set may eventually be used in a low-end or mid-range 370 or 9370, and then saying we will try to move it into a product as soon as possible – given the maturity of the chip set, I’d say that may be in the very near future. The set could be the basis of a desktop 370 but may turn up as the processor in the 4391 – it may get a 9370 designation – now seen for June.
