NTT-Intelligent Technology Corp, a joint venture between NTT Corp, 53%, Oki Electric, 35%, and sleeping partners, has unveiled what it claims to be the world’s fastest artificial intelligence workstation. Called Elis, for Electronic Communications Laboratory List Processor, it has a 20,000 gate CMOS array as the CPU, with 8Mb to 64Mb main memory, 64K-word writable control store, 32K-word stack, MC68010 front-end processor, serial and local net ports. Key Lisp functions are in firmware and the hardware is claimed to be 10 to 50 times faster than current artificial intelligence stations. It will initially run NTT’s KBMS Knowledge-Based Management System expert shell, but later add US ones like Knowledgecraft and KEE. It also runs Common Lisp, DEC 10 Prolog, Fortran 77 and C and is $67,000 with 8Mb and 125Mb disk, $205,500 with 64Mb and 270Mb disk. NTT-IT looks to sell 100 of the Elis workstations in year one.
