Brian Arnold Consultants GmbH, Osnabruck, West Germany, has come up with an EISA bus answer to IBM’s PS/2s with Intel 80860 RISC coprocessor fitted, and is driving the open standard bus rather harder than IBM is driving its muchtouted Micro Channel by supporting multiple processors of each type, and a Weitek 416725 maths coprocessor for good measure. Designed at the company’s development centre in Temple, Texas, the BAC 4860-25 can be configured as a workstation or file server, and comes with from two to four 80860s – and two 80486s from the autumn – and the Weitek chip. It supports AT&T, Santa Cruz Operation, Interactive Systems and SunOS Unix variants in its workstation guise, or Banyan Vines – and Novell NetWare when it arrives for the 80486 – as a server. With from 4Mb to 64Mb RAM, 380Mb disk, a floppy drive, six EISA slots, four serial and two parallel ports, it is rated by the company at 55 MIPS. The workstation variant is aimed at computer-aided design and desktop publishing markets. For dual 80860 processor hardware alone, it costs UKP10,000 now, in a full six-processor configuration, rated at at 240 MIPS, the price is $60,000 from the end of the year. It is the first in what Brian Arnold says will be a family of multiprocessors.
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