In Japan, the new Hitachi mainframes – configured to run the company’s VOS rewrite of MVS – come in four models of what the company is calling the M-880. The company is touting them as total management servers for the support and operation of a wide-area distributed system, and as a server for storage and maintenance of large databases. They come standard with 2Gb of main memory and 8Gb of expanded memory, and Hitachi claims 2.2G-bytes-per-second total input-output throughput performance, and 18Mbyte-per-second high-speed optical channel throughput. The company is mounting the 12,000 gate per chip, 70pS ECL arrays 36 to a 4 by 4 module, with 20 modules flat-mounted using super-high-speed multi-pin connectors, to provide a large platter that delivers three to 5.5 times the performance of the M-680H processor. The four models for Japan are the M-880/420 a four-way processor able to be run partitioned or in single image; the M-880/310 three-way processor; the M-880/220 two-way processor, again partitionable, and the M-880/210 dyadic version of the 220, which runs single image only. Features to improve multiprocessor performance include imrpovements in the degree of parallelism in linking the operating system and database-data communications software. The M-series Advanced Systems Architecture, M/ASA, which implements 16Tb addressing, enables all data required by an application to be stored in expanded memory. A new proprietary Integrated Database Processor is included in order to improve large-scale database processing, and relational data processing has been speeded up with new instructions for the XDM/RD database software. Up to 16 systems can be connected channel-to-channel and the maximum number of storage peripherals supported is increased to 1,024. First deliveries in Japan of most models are planned for the fourth quarter of 1990.
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