Amdahl Corp has wasted no time in responding to IBM’s new triadic, dual triadic and E models of the 3090 (CI No 607), and hasn’t even bothered to dream up a new letter, calling its enhanced CPUs E models as well. It’s numbering system, designed to approximate each model to its IBM counterpart, now looks very odd – it already has a 5090-300, and the new three-CPU box has to be the 5090-400E. It comes with up to 512Mb of main memory and 96 channels, and is $7.275m – about UKP6m over here – with 128Mb and 64 channels. First deliveries of the 400E, which offers 1.35 to 1.45 times the performance of the 300E, are set for the fourth quarter of this year. There are E models of the single-processor 5090-190 and 200 and dual processor 300, and of the four-processor 600, and upgrading existing machines to E performance is $120,000 – and users will automatically get the additional performance if they upgrade through the line. The main beneficiary of the E treatment is the 200, where it improves performance by 13%; on the others, the improvement is about 4%. E shipments begin in March for the 200E, June for the 190E and 300E, and the fourth quarter for the 600E. Amdahl saw no reason to add a six-CPU model at the top – the four-CPU 600E matches or outperforms IBM’s 3090/600 anyway.
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