Apart from IBM Corp and the plug-compatible vendors, ICL Plc seems to be about the only company still able to make a decent living out of traditional mainframes these days, and although its Unix business is coming up fast, while customers continue to buy mainframes in sufficient quantities, ICL will continue to add new models. Having revitalised the top of the line, the company has now turned its attention to the bottom end, replacing the Series 39 Levels 15XP, 25XP and 35XP with DX models that offer about 70% better performance, which means a new DM/1 processor. Aimed at departmental applications where a computer room environment is inappropriate, the machines, with processors fabricated in the relatively new BiCMOS technology 12,000 gates per chip, are the DX 130-10, DX 170-10 and DX 200-10, which also come in dual-node configurations as the 190-20, 230-20 and 270-20. Priced to undercut IBM’s AS/400s including the new ones? – and the DEC VAX 6000-410, the new line starts at UKP32,000 for a 130-10 with 16Mb memory. They run the SV 291 release of VME, and will run SV 292, which adds conformance to the X/Open Co Ltd Portability Guide release 3, when it ships later this year. Main memory goes to 64Mb per processor, and ICL rates the new models at 1.7 to 6.2 IBM MIPS.
