Richardson, Texas-based Convex Computer Corp, which has distinguished itself from rival minisupercomputer manufacturers by remaining consistently profitable over the last five years, is preparing for the launch of a new series of top-end machines early next year. Iain Davidson, vice-president of European operations, said last week that the new range – dubbed C3 would be an addition to the two year-old C2 range rather than a replacement, and hinted that the machines would include more Gallium Arsenide technology – first used in the memory detection and protection circuitry of last October’s ESP mid-life kicker to the C2. Convex designs its own CPU technology, farming out the fabrication of the gate arrays to Fujitsu, Texas Instruments and Vitesse Semiconductor, and Davidson sees little merit in the trend towards using off-the-shelf processors such as the Sparc and Intel 80860 in rival machines. The CPU is only 15% of the total product cost – most of the expense is in developing the memory and input-output bandwidth. In fact Davidson dismisses its traditional competitor Alliant’s 80860-based machine as difficult to program, and cites his only competition as being Cray Research, DEC and IBM. Of these, DEC has still to release a VAX 9000 with vector facility, and has no date for Unix on the 9000. And although Cray offers Unix, and is moving downwards to Convex territory, its 64-bit implementation uses incompatible data formats and has no virtual memory, making it unsuitable as a back-end system for workstations, according to Davidson. Convex is currently working on getting more industry-specific software converted to add to its current catalogue of 600 or so packages, mainly concentrating on markets such as computational chemistry, petroleum, defence and aerospace and computer-aided engineering. At the same time it is making its Unix implementation more like a mainframe operating system, and is currently awaiting C2 level security verification from the US Department of Defense. An optimised version of the Oracle 6.0 database is shortly to be announced. Convex revenues rose 50% in 1989 to $105.6m, and the company has just announced record second quarter revenues and profits. It also has $60m in cash. There are now almost 700 Convex systems installed with 400 customers worldwide, the company claims.
