If IBM believed that it would be business as usual after Hitachi Ltd took its international mainframe marketing into its own hands by acquiring National Advanced Systems – with a little help from Electronic Data Systems Corp, it is set to be disabused of that belief this year. Over the next few months, Hitachi plans to embarrass IBM as much as it can, first by anticipating the 4391, which US sources expect to be announced in June, UK in September, and then by coming out with a top-end mainframe delivering a claimed 45 MIPS from a uniprocessor, against about 28 MIPS for the 3090-180J, IBM’s biggest uniprocessor. The air-cooled machine pitched as an upgrade for 4381 users running out of steam and tired of waiting for IBM is expected in a few weeks and word is that it will deliver about 10 MIPS, with a dyadic version also to be offered. IBM’s 4391 is expected to deliver 7 MIPS in the uniprocessor version, 14 in the dyadic. Hitachi’s top-end Andromeda is expected to be offered in configurations of from one to four processors, with the top model delivering about 140 MIPS against 136 or so for the six processor 3090-600J. Meridian Group expects the four processor Hitachi system with 128 channels and 512Mb to be available before the end of this year. The machine is expected to come with an 8nS machine cycle and to take up only a quarter the floorspace of an equivalent 3090, and to be air-cooled, with a self-contained refrigerant. Up to 16Gb of Expanded Storage is expected to be offered where IBM stops at 4Gb – but Expanded Store is expected to come in a separate cabinet. Multiprocessors are expected to be linked together using a high-speed fibre optic interface, but not in the first models shipped. The company is also said to be working on a 60 MIPS uniprocessor for 1992. Hitachi has at times held the leadership position in terms of raw MIPS in the past, but has fallen badly behind both IBM and Amdahl Corp in the 3090 generation, with its biggest current machine rated at 88 MIPS. As well as embarrassing IBM – which was forced to respond to Amdahl’s 5990 with the 3090S models before the things were ready, with unhappy consequences – the Andromeda will steal some of Amdahl’s 5990-1400 thunder and make life tougher for the Sunnyvale company. Amdahl is working on a box code-named Eagle to succeed the 5990.
