Mentec Computer Systems Ltd has built its own board-level version of Digital Equipment Corp’s J-11 PDP-11 microprocessor. The Dublin, Ireland firm will be using the implementation in its M11 board, to be sold from mid-December into the firm’s existing customer base. Instead of a J-11, the board incorporates a microengine which uses an Intel Corp 80960 RISC chip to do the housekeeping while a selection of gate arrays, microsequencers and arithmetic-logic units bought from various suppliers form the heart of the engine. The Q-Bus-based board runs at 20MHz but is double-clocked and is said to double performance on average over existing J-11 implementations. The M11 follows on from the M70, released in 1984, the M90 in 1988 and the M100 which shipped in 1991. Dermot O’Connor, international product manager for Mentec, affirmed the firm’s strong relationship with DEC. Mentec announced a PDP-11 distribution agreement with the manufacturer in September, and is due to release Alpha boards next month, which DEC helped it to develop (CI No 2,016). O’Connor said that its customer base had asked it for a faster, non-J-11-dependant module. There are applications which have grown in size over the years and more performance is required to keep in line with the software investments, he said, adding that at some stage in the far future the supply of J-11 microprocessors could dwindle. The company already has orders for the M11 five months from launch, from as far away as Japan. O’Connor expects to recover research and development costs in five years. We’ll still be selling it in 10, he said. Some 90% of the business has come from abroad.
