Bull and its Honeywell Bull affiliates in the US, the UK and Italy duly launched the DPS 7000 line of low-end departmental processors in the French-designed GCOS 7 line of mainframes. The line consists of five models – 7000/10 to 50, each a uniprocessor built in 2 micron CMOS gate arrays having 22,000 logical gates per chip, over 60,000 transistors. Designed around a central memory bus 130 bits wide – 32 for data, 28 address lines, the rest for system functions – running at 27Mbytes per second, the system implements a five-stage pipeline. The machines have an enormous cache memory for their class of 64Mb, and the central processing complex of five processing elements is supported by separate input-output processors with an aggregate data rate of 25Mbytes per second. The entire complex is under the control of a Service Administration Processor. Main memory extends to 16Mb, and the DPS 7000 is pitched against the DEC VAX 8200 to 8650, and the IBM 9370s. Bull claims that the 7000 Model 40 outperforms both the IBM 9377/90 and the DEC VAX 8530. In comparison to the low-end DPS 7 models that are replaced, the Model 20 is rates at 50% to 80% faster than the DPS 7/307. The machines run the GCOS 7-AS operating system and are inter alia designed as remote processors to an IBM 370-type host. They support the Oracle relational database manager and offer direct communication with MS-DOS Personalikes supporting Oracle. Deliveries begin immediately, and a DPS 7000/20 with 8Mb memory, two 500Mb disk drive, 1,600 bpi tape streamer and one communications processor with three synchronous lines is about UKP91,800. The power range from bottom to top of the DPS 7000 line is estimated at about six to one. A 7000/40 with 8Mb, four 500Mb disk drives, 6,250 bpi tape streamer, 700 lpm printer and one communications processor with seven synchronous lines is UKP205,000. Bull offers one year’s free maintenance; ships in France have begun.
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