Hitachi Ltd’s not going to take IBM Corp’s CMOS G5 mainframe assault lying down and is already seeding the market with news of a next-generation bi-CMOS/ECL Skyline2 series performing a reported 250 to 280 MIPS as a uniprocessor. Hitachi says a new version of its ACE chipset will keep it at least 2.5 times ahead of the closest CMOS performer. It claims its current 150 MIPS Skyline is still 40% faster than the 125 MIPS, high-end G5 CMOS mainframe IBM recently announced, using Gartner Group performance and throughput benchmarks to evaluate multiprocessor performance. Hitachi said the new Skyline processor will debut in 1999 but declined to say whether that would be in the fourth quarter of the year. Meanwhile, Meta Group expects IBM’s CMOS CPU to be performing at least 160 MIPS by the time the new Skyline is available. Hitachi wouldn’t comment on Meta’s observation that Skyline is now matching CMOS CPU prices which are $6,000 per MIPS – falling to $4,500 per MIPS by the end of the year – and maintenance costs of $30 per MIPS per month. Skylines have traditionally been around 15% more expensive than CMOS. Industry observers say that no matter how impressive Skyline2 is Hitachi won’t have the same runaway success it did with the first Skyline series. By hook and by crook CMOS performance is catching up. It’s no wonder, they say, Hitachi has decided to go with Hewlett- Packard Co’s V2200 and future IA-64 HP-UX data center servers and yesterday announced it is packaging UniKix Technologies’ mainframe CICS emulation software on its re-badged IBM RS/6000s as an Uniprise entry-level mainframe server, performing the equivalent of 60 mainframe MIPS.
