FPS Computing – legally it’s still Floating Point Systems today formally announces its alliance with Sun Microsystems Inc under which it will build a Sparc RISC-based supercomputer (CI No 1,446) – helping to fulfil Sun’s dream of emulating Unix itself by having one hardware architecture used in compatible Unix machines from laptops to supercomputers. Key feature of the planned FPS Model 500EA machine is the Scalable Interconnect Architecture, a high bandwidth bus with advanced address translation caches that links multiple heterogeneous processors – vector, scalar and parallel processing – with system memory and input-output. FPS also announced its Intel 80860-based Integrated Matrix Co-processor. With an average 28 80860s, the thing is claimed to deliver 1 GFLOPS, with the maximum 84 of the things, it is claimed to do 6.7 GFLOPS.The Model 500EA will start at $820,000 and go to $4m with Matrix Co-processor fitted. No delivery dates were given but the 500EA is expected to be out in first half 1991.
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