Cray Research Inc is to begin shipments this month of its new Sparc Vector II processor for its Cray S-MP superserver system. The Sparc Vector II processor is claimed to boost vector performance of the superserver product by a factor of four over the previous S-MP vector module. Shipments begin this month and the company says it has taken orders totalling more than $4m for systems based on the new chip. The Vector II has a peak speed of 267M-FLOPS in 64-bit or 32-bit IEEE floating point arithmetic, and does a sustained 206 MFLOPS on the Linpack 1,000 by 1,000 benchmark. The S-MP can be configured with up to eight 15nS Sparc scalar processors or a combination of one to two Vector II processors for 533 MFLOPS total vector performance, and up to four scalar Sparc processors. The system can also include multiple Cray Attached Parallel Processor systems for problems, or parts of problems, that are highly parallel. All currently installed S-MP systems can be field upgraded with the new Vector II processor, Cray says.
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