Cambridge, UK-based Myriad Solutions, maker of 80860-based accelerator cards for MS-DOS personal computers, has launched what it claims to be the first single processor applications accelerator board to achieve 100 MFLOPS. The Dash!860/50 board uses the new 64-bit, 50MHz Intel 80860XP RISC processor with 8Mb dynamic-RAM as standard, expandable to 32Mb, custom memory manager, and shared memory for fast data transfer. Like its slower relative, the Dash!860/25, which uses the 25MHz 80860, the AT board supports C, C++ Fortran and Pascal compilers, maths, signal, image processing and graphics libraries including Dore, NeuralWare and Owl, and can be accessed by MS-DOS-based appications, including Microsoft Windows 3.0 and Desqview. Myriad turns out to be the supplier of boards for Boulder, Colorado-based Set Technology Corp’s 80486-80860 imaging workstation, and Myriad has a similar product itself, the Dash!25, packaged as an integrated workstation. As an add-in board, the Dash!80860/25 costs from UKP3,500. The company’s next move is to implement full Unix or X Window on the 80860, so that it can run applications written for pure 80860 workstations such as those from Samsung Electronics Co and Oki Electric Industry Co. Myriad says the 80860 is particularly good at numerically intensive applications such as computer-aided design, electrical design, visualisation, engineering simulation and image processing. The company says it also has a deal with NeuralWare Inc of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, whose products are distributed as a package in the UK through Scientific Computer Systems Ltd. Myriad and Set are among the companies looking to license Du Pont Pixel Inc’s Fusix 80860 software environment.
