Fujitsu Ltd claims to have a new special-purpose computer designed to speed up and improve the testing of hardware designs for large mainframes: the Simulation Processor logic simulation machine can connect an array of up to 64 special processors and is claimed to perform a peak 5.3 Giga-logic element evaluations per second, 3,000 times the speed at which the 3081-class M380 can perform logic simulation and analysis; Fujitsu has hitherto done the work on a standard mainframe, so that the new top-end M780 was simulated on an M380, but the company hopes to halve the time for design testing of new machines to six months using the new Simulation Processor.
