A new player in the real-time, symmetrical multi-processing market made its debut at the French Unix show. The Paris-based Dune Technologies SA launched the 68030-based Dune 3000 running a real time Unix kernel developed in-house known as Dune-iX. With up to four 25MHz processors, each capable of supporting up to 32Mb memory, the 3000 is front-ended by Sun workstations with X Window and the NeWS window manager. Dune-iX is binary compatible with System V/68 3.5, and includes dynamic load-balancing. Out in May, a single processor model starts at $67,000 and goes up to $167,000 for a four processor configuration. It comes with TCP/IP, Ethernet and SCSI interface. A 68040-based version is planned, and an 88000 RISC-based system will be developed in the future. Dune employs 15 at present but expects that to double by year-end.
