One of the quirkiest technological releases expected this year – somewhat later than originally promised – comes from Sunnyvale, California-based Commercial Data Servers (CDS), founded in 1994 by Gene Amdahl, creator of the IBM System 360 and founder of Amdahl Corporation. CDS – which began shipping its CDS 2000 low- cost replacements for IBM’s 4300 mainframe line last year (CI No 3,180) – has since been working on the CDS 2000++, a mainframe server that uses cryogenic superconductive cooling. The technology uses helium gas to lower the processor temperature to the point where there is little or no resistance to electrical current. At -90C, speed can increase by 70% to 80%, with no extra power consumption. Amdahl has cast the CDS 2000++, previously known as the CDS-1, as an affordable competitor to small IBM mainframes and as a cheap replacement for mainframes with unfixable Year 2000 problems. It’s already been shipping its current line of products as test machines for legacy code at IBM mainframe shops, bundling in the OS/390 operating system and Computer Associates International Inc’s Discovery 2000 tools, with prices starting at $200,000. CDS predicts that performance on the new machines will be boosted by a factor of three, and that the CDS 2000++ will be the fastest uniprocessor on the market. The product is expected to emerge within the next few months. CDS 2000++ does not rely heavily on semiconductor innovation – concentrating instead on systems built around established IBM-compatible mainframe designs. For this reason, the impact may be limited. Cooling systems are expensive, and will be even more so if the volumes are small. Meanwhile Kryotech Inc, a spin-off from NCR Corp, is also experimenting with freezing chips so they run faster. In February, the company demonstrated a thermally accelerated Digital Equipment Alpha workstation running Windows NT, and is working on technology to speed up Intel Pentium chips (CI No 3,387).
