IBM UK drew a complete blank when asked a few weeks ago to prospect for details of the company’s latest effort to bring stand-alone VM to the desktop, but Computerworld has fared rather better, and has pinned down a fairly full specification for the elusive machine. The first thing that is evident is that the box – which has the anonymous name of the 7437 – must be built around one of the many 370 architecture microprocessors IBM has described so lovingly at various high-flown semiconductor conferences, and not the splendid kluge the company used in the XT/370 and AT/370 – the 370 side of those were made up of two Motorola 68000s, one specially microcoded with critical 370 instructions, plus an Intel 8087 or 80287 mathematics co processor. It is possible that IBM has simply pulled the same trick with 68020s, but it’s very unlikely, because the 7437, which is a co-processor for the PS/2 – presently a Model 80 or Model 60, is rated at 0.7 370 MIPS against 0.1 MIPS for the AT/370, supports a full 16Mb memory against 512Kb for the old machine, has 16Mb virtual address space against 8Mb on the AT/370, takes up to 628Mb disk against just 60Mb, and has a data transfer rate to a host of over 30Mbytes-per-second against 100Kbytes-per-minute for the AT/370. Most important of all it runs full VM/SP Release 5 and is multi-tasking, against just a single-tasking subset – essentially a single-tasking, single-user CMS virtual machine – on the AT/370. Occupying five boards, the 7437 uses the PS/2 to receive VM/SP 5 from the users host mainframe, and to dump the fruits of its labours on the host. If anyone wants the thing – and it may prove interesting for running things like CAD/CAM applications as well as for software development – they must already have a VM/SP licence, and agree to take a minimum of 25 of the things, at $18,000 apiece. IBM is mulling selling single 7437s, but is worried about self-impact on the 9370 and even the RT. Lockheed Corp’s Cadam Inc unit bought 25 7437s and uses them to demonstrate Cadam at shows – delighted that it is so much easier to move about and set up than is a 9370.
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