These are not IBM attack machines, remarked ICL chairman Peter Bonfield yesterday as the UK mainframe maker launched two new systems at the top of its VME-based Series 39 that look like the company’s answer to IBM’s forthcoming Summit machines and are claimed to use the most powerful general purpose mainframe uniprocessor currently available. And his UK managers sharing the platform went on to use IBM’s 3090 Series as the price-performance yardstick against which the new SX systems were judged. The SX 580-20 and SX 550-20 systems have been under development since the launch of the original Series 39 five years ago, and ICL has spent something in the region of UKP200m to do the job. They are built using Fujitsu’s Hawk Emitter Coupled Logic arrays, the same base technology that is used by Amdahl in its two-year-old 5990 mainframe. Fujitsu fabricates the circuits to ICL’s design, and ICL assembles the things on its own 42-layer boards. The first two models, the SX 580-20 and SX 550-20 are dual processors, and the company is planning to go up to six processors. Uniprocessor models will follow next year. A two-node SX 580-20 is rated by the company at 90 IBM MIPS, which is around 60% more powerful than existing four-node Series 39 Level 80s, or equivalent to the performance of a four-processor IBM 3090/400 J. The SX550-20 in a two-node configuration comes in at 60 IBM MIPS, whilst a six-node 580-20 is expected to deliver up to 300 MIPS. Main memory on the new systems goes up to 512Mb per node in units of 128Mb, and over 100 FDS 5000 disk drives can be attached, allowing up 6Tb of storage to be accessed. A new 200Mbits-per-second Macrolan 200 optical fibre link is also introduced, enabling SX nodes to be placed over a mile apart. The flat CPU board carries 336 of the ECL chips, each chip having 3,000 logic gates. Input-output traffic flows through up to 16 50Mbit-per-second Macrolan links on each node which again can be over a mile apart – though extended versions of Macrolan allow disaster-tolerant sites to have devices attached up to 15 miles from the node. Local area network connection is via a 10Mbit-per-second OSLAN highway, wide area networking is provided by the Series 39 X25 controller. Prices go from UKP5m for a two-node 580-20 with 256Mb RAM, (UKP325,000 per quarter under ICL’s exchange hire), and UKP3.5m for a 550-20, (UKP215,000 per quarter), up to UKP15m or more for a six-node 580-20 implementation. Although there are no plans to offer a native-mode Unix operating system on the Series 39, ICL is currently working on an implementation of X/Open Co Ltd’s Common Application Environment interface which will be offered on the line next year, enabling compliant applications to be transferred between VME and Unix environments. ICL claims UKP20m in advance orders for five two-node systems. In the UK, the Inland Revenue is installing a Series 39 SX 550-20 its Telford development centre, and an SX 580-20 which will take over the workload of a four-node Series 39 Level 80 system. And Yorkshire Electricity is replacing five Series 39 Level 80s with two SX 550-20s at its Leeds office. In France, OR Telematique SA has ordered an SX 580-20 to handle the expansion of its on-line business information services. It currently uses a two-node Series 39 Level 80 at its Loire Valley chateau. ICLograms – p2