Digital Equipment Corp’s desktop-to-mainframe Alpha RISC roll-out, scheduled for November 10, are to include the widely previewed Flamingo deskside, now re-christened the DEC/3000 Model 500/500S (CI No 2,033). The uniprocessor is said to deliver 125 SPECmarks at 150MHz, come with 64Mb to 1Gb RAM, three-dimensional graphics, six Turbochannel slots and run OpenVMS – OSF/1 now appears to have been put back until July next year. The desktop Sandpiper is to be known as the Model 400/400S and will do 110 SPECmarks at 133MHz, with 30W power consumption. It comes with with from 32Mb to 512Mb RAM, up to 105Gb disk, ISDN, three Turbochannel slots, Ethernet, SCSI II, two-dimensional graphics and optional FDDI and also runs OpenVMS in its initial guise, with a desktop OSF/1 implementation to follow. According to sources, a user evaluating IBM’s 100 SPECmark-rated RS/6000 Model 970 against similarly configured Hewlett-Packard Co Precision Architecture RISC 7100 and DEC Alpha systems found that in application performance comparisons, the RS/6000 came out on top, followed by the Hewlett-Packard and DEC boxes, although there was some variation according to job mix.
