Amdahl Corp is now expected to offer two lines of multiprocessing Sparc systems, which it will announce later this year, to-day’s edition of our sister paper Unigram.X reports. The company is not now waiting for the 64-bit Sparc parts it originally intended to use but, like its ICL Plc cousin, is expected to use existing superscalar Sparc processors from Texas Instruments Inc and the Ross Technology Inc unit that Fujitsu Ltd is acquiring from Cypress Semiconductor Corp. This year will see the launch of a Workgroup Server, described by the company as a system for distributed computing with (in Amdahl’s terms) mid-range performance. The high-end Enterprise Server will be pitched as a big mission-critical system with mainframe performance – 200 mainframe MIPS – and fault-tolerant characteristics or RAS – Reliability, Availability and Serviceability – in the IBMspeak Amdahl uses. It will support IBM mainframe peripherals, including disks and tape drives, plus SCSI and FDDI. The Sparc machines are expected to come with up to 20 CPUs each and will start life as $150,000 to $200,000 boxes. They will run a version of the Amdahl UTS Unix for Sparc, offering binary compatibility, Amdahl says, with its 5995M mainframe series UTS Unix. Amdahl claims 60 existing customers of UTS on 5995s, and says it hasn’t lost a single customer to downsizing – strange given that it is talking up its Sparc systems as rightsizing tools. Amdahl’s RISC project dates back to 1990 when it inherited technology from the failed Key Computer Laboratories Inc.
