Amdahl Corp has reportedly scrapped its plans to build a Unix supercomputer using the technology for which it acquired Key Computer Laboratories for $30m. The project has been plagued by delays and the company is believed to have decided that the machine has now missed the boat for which it was designed in terms of price-performance. The clincher that sounded the death knell for the project was the company’s apparent inability to persuade enough third parties with scientific and engineering applications to put them up under the implementation of Unix planned for the machine, which was to have been built using an ECL chip set fabricated by Amdahl’s 46% shareholder Fujitsu Ltd. According to Electronic News, which got no immediate confirmation of the story, Amdahl’s strategy now will be to transfer the people that were working on the Key project over to the 7300 line of Unix-only mainframes that are based on Fujitsu’s M-760 4391-class machines. In the medium term, the paper hears, the company is weighing the possibility of transferring the input-output subsystem developed for the Key machine to off-the-shelf RISC processors, with the R-series from MIPS Computer Systems Inc and the Sparc from Sun Microsystems Inc the leading contenders. The Key machine was being designed to take from one to eight processors, and to deliver three times the scalar performance and comparable vector performance to that of the Cray Research Inc Y-MP – 300 MIPS per processor to give a whopping 2,400 MIPS in its largest configuration.
