DSM Digital Service GmbH, Munich, West Germany says it is ready to ship its Genesys SPC 860 expansion board, first demonstrated at Hannover’s CeBIT fair this year. DSM is claiming that it is possible to link 256 of the Intel 80860-based boards together so giving every personal computer from the IBM XT upwards a maximum performance of 20 GFLOPS – in other words, for under $6,000 a board, software developers would have almost the same computing power on their XTs, ATs and Unix workstations as on a bottom end Cray Research supercomputer with a price tag of $1.5m. The problem for DSM at the moment, according to Computerwoche, is that its OEM customers have not yet accepted the claims made for the SPC 860 and prefer to stick with their established lines indeed, DSM chief Manuel Vieira is resigned to a two year wait before the product gains proper acceptance. This has not, however, stopped DSM going ahead with its development of a 300 MIPS board, most likely to be based on the Intel 80870 RISC and available early 1991.
GERMANS PLAY BOARD GAMES: DSM WANTS TO TURN YOUR XT INTO A CRAY WITH 80860S…
