It has been a longer wait than the company hoped, but there are one or two surprises in store when Dr Gene Amdahl’s Andor Systems Inc in Cupertino, launches its IBMulators at the end of this year: We also decided to provide remote shadowing in our processor design to give at least as much fault-tolerance as Tandem machines, he revealed last week. The architecture of the basic 370 processor has been squeezed onto five chip types – one of the chips in the set is used several times – designed to deliver the performance of a 3090. Andor had been working with Motorola Inc, but – we had to change our chip vendor. It turned out that our original chip vendor wasn’t able to put as much on a chip as he said it could. Or at least he wasn’t prepared to, so we’ve moved over to NEC. We didn’t want to switch to a non-US company but it was the only supplier that could do what we wanted, explained Dr Amdahl. Moreover, It’s no good to have a CPU only, you have to build all the things that surround it, to take the peripherals outside the computer room. The tape drives, the communications and the disk all need less power and need to work in a normal office. We had to build our own disk controller which is completely compatible with the 3990, including all of its cache and some things that IBM didn’t even put in there. Dr Amdahl sees his machines being used as distributed processors for locations where there are no computer room facilities, linked to compatible hosts; he is not trying to compete with 3090-600 class machines as yet. Dr Amdahl believes that IBM doesn’t use the same degree of integration in its high-end mainframes not because it can’t but because it would lead to commodity pricing and IBM doesn’t want that at the high end where it gets half its profits. We can build a machine faster than the 600J ourselves because we have a breakthrough into higher levels of parallelism than IBM is currently capable of using. We have the mathematics and you’ll see it in silicon towards the end of our second generation machines.
