In the next couple of weeks, Compagnie des Machines Bull SA’s eight-way symmetric multiprocessing PowerPC 601-based Escalas will finally become available. It reports performance marks of 2660.3 TPC-C, $530 tpm-C, for the deskside D401/8 and 2660.3 TPC-C, $560 tpm-C, for the rackmount R201/1, both running Informix 7.1 and Rev 3.0 of the TPC benchmark. The four way Escala D201/4 and R201/4s deliver 1562.93, $549 tpm-C, and 1562.93, $584 tpm-C, respectively. The company is expected to re-price the desksides at the same time and claims that now it is taking 25 orders a day it will have shipped 2,000 Escalas by the end of this month. By comparison, Hewlett-Packard Co’s K-Class quad-processors achieve 2,616 TPC-C at $544 tpm-C – the eight-way T500 does 3118.20 TPC -C. Like other parts of the PowerPC community, Bull says it has been hamstrung by the dearth of 604s, which it cannot get in sufficient numbers to put into its symmetric multiprocessing boxes until September. Meantime, it is also expected to unveil the promised low-end unit built from the guts of Motorola Inc’s PowerStack Series E as a uniprocessor which it hopes can be fitted with 604s from July. The Motorola Peripheral Component Interconnect-based motherboard will be housed in new desktop and mini-tower configurations, with new communications and workgroups, and pushed out through a new channel programme. Solaris will feature by year-end, it promised. Also in July, Bull will unveil its Mississippi technology for clustering up to eight Escala nodes, and add a raft of data warehousing, access, replication management and gateway software. Although it claims it has some samples lurking in Italy – general sampling is due this quarter according to Somerset’s original schedule – PowerPC 620 systems are now firmly billed as first-half 1996 products. Meanwhile, Bull and Motorola have been in Italy deciding what PowerPC-based products should be in their development plans. Apparently they think that both Zenith Data Systems and Packard Bell Electronics Inc, the first a subsidiary of Bull, the second a minority-owned partner which is now closely allied with Zenith, could be PowerPC playmates. Although at the time the company claimed otherwise, the negotiations appear to have scuppered the planned launch of a separate Bull software subsidiary in the US in the immediate future. But Bull says that it still fully intends to go ahead with the software venture.
