With an entry price of $995,000, Control Data Corp’s ETA Systems in St Paul, Minnesota is hoping to change all the rules in the supercomputer business with its new air-cooled CMOS ETA10-P and Q minisupercomputers. The company also announced Unix for the ETA10 in the shape of ETA System V, as an alternative to the proprietary EOS. The ETA10-P has a 24nS cycle and, as expected (CI No 789), has a performance rating of 25 Mflops in the Linpack 100 by 100 benchmark, but the 64-bit machine has a peak performance of 375Mflops running 32-bit instructions. The 10-P with 64Mb memory, upgradable to 128Mb, is available now, and a dual pro-cessor model will be out next year. A single-CPU 10-Q, with 19nS cycle time, cost from $1.2m and will be available early next year. The new machines, each with a single board CPU simultaneously announced a landmark order from the Tokyo departmental supercomputers and give the ETA10 line a compatible performance range of 27 times, bottom to top. Institute of Technology for the most powerful supercomputer in Japan. The pact, worth over $20m, is for an ETA10 with eight processors – the fastest supercomputer in the world says ETA, to ship in March.
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