Nothing has been heard from Gene Amdahl’s latest venture, Andor Systems Inc for a very long time, but the good doctor popped up in Hong Kong last week to open the Asian headquarters for his Andor International operation. According to the South China Morning Post, he brought with him an almost evangelistic message on mainframes, insisting that they were far from dinosaurs. The mainframe is by far the most complex of computing vehicles and, as such, it had to wait longer in the technology revolution for the technology to reach a point to produce a really economical mainframe system. And that time is approximately now, he said. Andor currently has only one product, the CacheXchange, which enhances mainframe performance by providing disk cacheing and dual copy facilities. Andor’s prototype mainframe on a board is claimed to run at about 10 MIPS, and to produce one-third the heat generated by the average personal computer. By the time it is ready for launch, he says, performance should be up around 40 MIPS to 50 MIPS, making it a true desktop mainframe. Andor’s Asian arm will be a joint venture with local partners. The firm has sales and marketing rights for Hong Kong, Thailand, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.
