Amdahl Corp, which in contrast to IBM’s dire performance is forecasting an 80% leap in fourth quarter profits, yesterday announced the first uniprocessor model in its new 5890 line. The 5890/190 is half of the dyadic 5890/300 and is claimed to deliver 0.51 to 0.54 times the performance, which at announcement was put at about 38 MIPS (CI No 299). It comes with up to 256Mb of main memory and up to 48 channels, and supports Amdahl’s Multiple Domain Feature hardware partitioning, enabling users to create up to four partitions. The 580 expanded storage and high speed channels will be available on it in the third quarter of 1987. Amdahl has boldly priced the machine a little above the IBM 3090-180 against which it is pitched – but claims 35% more throughput, offering it at $2.625m with 32Mb and 16 channels where IBM wants $2.617m for a 3090-180 similarly-configured. The Amdahl machine however takes a maximum of 48 channels where the IBM is limited to 32. Apart from 35% better performance, the new Amdahl box takes 232 square feet against 609 for the IBM, and is about half the weight.
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