Digital Equipment Corp’s Series 3000 workstations, models 700 and 900, which it has just added to the 600 and 800 models launched nine months ago, are the first to be based on the firm’s so-called ‘EV4 Shrink’ or ‘EV4/5’ Alpha AXP chip sets. These microprocessors, officially called the DECchip 21064A, run at either 225MHz or 275MHz and ship in volume about two months ahead of schedule. The 21064A improves on the 21064 part that underpins most AXP products. Fabricated at 0.5 micron, it costs $1,090 for the 275MHz version in lots of 5,000. In the Model 900, with 2Mb cache, it performs about 11% better than expected on integer benchmarks but about 9% worse than expected for floating point work, according to the SPEC92 suite. The Model 700 and Model 900 workstations deliver SPECint92 of 162.2 and 189.3 respectively, and SPECfp92 of 230.6 and 264.1 respectively. The list price of the Model 600 workstation is reduced by $2,500 to $17,500. The Model 900 effectively replaces the Model 800 with a 40% performance boost. Processor board-swap kits enabling customers to upgrade the Model 600 to the Model 700 and the Model 800 to Model 900 cost $6,000 and $9,000 respectively. Currently, AXP workstations achieve a 40% advantage in integer performance over the similarly priced HP 9000 Model 735/125, and about a 54% integer advantage over the IBM 59H, which costs over 70% more. But AXP’s lead in floating point work is smaller than that in integer, and even its integer lead may be soon narrowed or even eclipsed given constant competitive leapfrogging, believe analysts at Illuminata. Meanwhile, they say, given the ongoing introduction of Peripheral Component Interconnect bus, the two new Turbochannel-based graphics accelerators also introduced, the ZLX-E2 and the ZLX-E3, may be the last DEC workstations to be bundled with Turbochannel input-output support. The AdvantageCluster Compute Server 5000 – which is four DEC 2100 Sables with up to 16 processors – is a single rack-mount system that can be used as a building block in clusters of up to 400 processors. In the autumn, tipsters expect to see an update of the 2100 Sable system using the 275MHz DECchip 21064A processors with large caches, perhaps 4Mb, compared with 2Mb in the Model 900, plus TurboLaser, a follow-on to the DEC 7000 Laser multiprocessor incorporating a modular design, Peripheral Component Interconnect-based input-output, and, for the first time, second-generation DECchip 21164 processors based on the planned ‘EV5’ technology said to deliver roughly 300 SPECint92 per CPU.
