Meantime Hitachi Ltd has launched its first CMOS mainframes, presumably using the chips supplied by IBM Corp under their agreement last year under which Hitachi also agreed to take the SP2 parallel RS/6000, which it launched in July as the SR4300. Hitachi will start shipping the new MP5400 mainframes on September 20; it is designed to support networked computers running either Unix or Windows NT, although the latter capability will not be ready until the end of next year. Hitachi describes the MP5400 as a parallel server with relational database functionality and throughput time half that of its existing systems. Hitachi plans to sell 3,000 MP5400s over five years, with a third going out in the first 12 months, some to customers elsewhere in South-east Asia; the machines run VOSK/FS and VOS1/FS and Hitachi’s HI-UX/WE2 Unix. Entry price is $80,000.
