Elxsi Corp, San Jose, yesterday unveiled a new processor for its 6400 series of minisupercomputers and claimed that systems using it offered twice the power of the IBM 3090-600 at a third the price. Called the Pegasus Superframe, the new minisupercomputer fully configured comes with 10Mb cache, 320Mbyte-per-second bus supporting 10 of the new processors, 2Gb of fast memory and as many as four concurrent operating systems. Elxsi, where Dr Gene Amdahl is chairman, rates the machine at 250 VAX MIPS and 100 MFLOPS on the 100 by 100 Linpack benchmark. As well as impressive vector and scalar performance, the macine is claimed to offer the transaction processing speed of the best in large database machines – and current Elxsi systems can be upgraded to the new performance. The company reckons that users would need UKP28m of DEC VAXes to gain the same performance. A Pegasus Superframe system consisting of one 6460 CPU – rated at 25 VAX MIPS, 10 MFLOPS – 32Mb memory, 823Mb disk, tape system and operating system is $695,000. A fully configured 10 processor system is $4m. Operating systems are Unix System V, BSD 4.2, the proprietary Embos, and EMS emulation of the VMS environment.
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