Under the shadow of Tower Bridge DEC duly unveiled its largest systems – so far – in London yesterday, and set its own sights on capturing 10% of the UK mainframe market within two years. The VAX Series 9000 comes in five models – each supporting optional vector processors – built around DEC’s air-cooled, ECL, Multi-Chip Unit, which packs MCA-III and STRAM chips into a 4 by 4 unit connected by a polymide-copper High Density Signal Carrier. First out next spring, with an UKP850,000 price tag, is the non-expandable single processor VAX 9000 Model 210 running VMS and Ultrix which like the other models, comes with up to 512Mb RAM. The Model 210VP, with vector processing, is rated at 125 MFLOPS – but was not priced. The multiprocessor VAX 9000 Models $10, 420, 430 and 440, come with one, two, three and four processors respectively – the Model 440 is rated at 100 MIPS will be out next July, and go from UKP1.3m to UKP3.25m. Their vector processing equivalents, for floating point-intensive computation, are rated at from 125 to 500 MFLOPS. As reported yesterday, (CI No 1,290), a new version of the VMS operating system supporting vector processing is needed for the all the machines, with the exception of the the Model 210; it will also be out in July. The Series 9000 Models 400s will also run the multi-processing version of Ultrix that DEC is currently working on: it is promised in a few months. Other new software includes a revamped Fortran compiler. Also on offer from July will be vector processing versions of the VAX 6000 Series – one vector processor is available on Models 410, 430 and 440, two on the 420. Performance goes from 45 to 90 MFLOPS and prices will start at UKP22,300. .pl 63
