Unisys Corp yesterday unveiled a new top-end processor in its OS 1100 family of mainframes and claimed $200m in first day orders for the machine. The 2200/900 is said to offer up to 2.5 times the performance of the 2200/600, and will be the first 2200 to be offered in tightly-coupled eight-processor configurations at present it is offered with two, three and four, and the company claims that in four-processor configuration, it outperforms the IBM Corp 9021-660 Summit machine by 50% – but then the 660 is only a two-way multiprocessor. The eight-processor capability is part of what Unisys calls Extended Processing Architecture for the 36-bit machines, which extends real storage to 2Gb and virtual address space to 256Gb. The machine supports up to eight input-output complex cabinets for a total of 480 channels. The present maximum configuration is four four-processor complexes run as a closely-coupled cluster with single-image view of a shared database for claimed performance of 5,000 transactions per second; ultimately up to 16 eight-processor complexes will be able to be clustered for a total of 128 CPUs. Unisys says that the machine was designed using the same chip simulation and design tools as the A16 and A19 mainframes, the same MCA III ECL arrays from Motorola Inc are used in both families, and standard cabinet and rack modules are used for both mainframe lines at the Roseville, Minnesota plant. Unfortunately, this does not address the problem of finding the resources to support two completely different top-end mainframe operating systems. First customers include Union Bank of Switzerland, Yamaichi Securities, DBV AG, Australian Customs, Tokyo Electric Co and Chubu Electric Co. First ships are set for second quarter 1992 at UKP6.3m for a dual processor model and UKP12m for the four-CPU.
