BiiN Inc, the Intel Corp-Siemens AG joint venture company, yesterday announced its first products, the BiiN 60 and BiiN 20, and sprung a big surprise by reluctantly revealing that the underlying processor is not a modified 80386 or an iAPX-432 but the 80960 introduced by Intel in April (CI No 902). Intel says that the 32-bit 80960 applies RISC techniques to create a high zperformance architecture that can be easily modified for specific azpplications; conceived primarily for embedded applications where 32-bit performance is needed, the 80960 is said to include elements of the ill-fated iAPX-432. The company sees the US government as its likely first customer, and so has formated BiiN Federal Systems. The BiiN 60 can be configured with two to eight processors, and performance is claimed to exceed 40 MIPS. It Zfeatures dynamically-selectable fault tolerance and is designed to support more than 1,000 terminals in transaction processing environments; it is available immediately. BiiN 20 is a desk side or desk-top box with one or two processors, performance up to 9 MIPS, for ships in March 1989. A key feature of the architecture is that many functions typically found in system software are done in hardware for increased reliability, availability and scalability. Database functions – transaction integrity and distribution – are built into the BiiN/OS operating system, and the hardware architecture harks back to the ill-fated Intel iAPX-432 by combining an advanced form of user access control with a hardware-enforced mechanism to check security on every access a running program makes to data or to system services. And, in another hark back to the iAPX-432, BiiN/OS and its utilities are written in about 2m lines of Ada language code code, and operating system services are directly accessible in the form of Ada packages. For Unix buffs, the BiiN Open System Interface Extension, BOSIX, will provide a Posix-compliant interface and 250 Unix utilities. The BiiN iiCONS Window Manager implements the X Window System. BiiN has also signed with Relational Technology Inc to offer its complete Ingres product line as BiiN’s flagship database management system. No prices were provided.
