Having largely left its Clipper RISC past behind it as it moves over to the Sun Microsystems Inc Sparc, Huntsville, Alabama-based Intergraph Corp’s computer systems unit is filling in its low end with big Pentium-based servers, and has announced the six-way InterServe MP6 as the first of a new generation of servers designed to fully exploit the power of Pentium chips. It says the ISMP6 series features a completely new architecture designed to remove the bottlenecks found in today’s servers: they come with two to six 100MHz Pentiums, and features including faster internal data transfer using the Peripheral Component Interconnect bus, data security and fast-wide SCSI-2 disk drives. They also use the CBUS II high-speed memory bus from Corollary Inc that runs at a sustained 267M-bytes per second. The servers provide 1Mb of secondary cache, with specially designed cache modules that operate in burst synchronous mode to provide true zero-wait-state access. They will be out in the second half of 1995 because of the shortage of 100MHz Pentiums. They will have a list price of $44,000 with a street price expected to be 15% to 25% lower. The company reckons that current iAPX-86 architectures struggle to cope with the performance of Pentium, and that the current generation of Pentium symmetrical processing servers is poorly adapted to supporting more than two Pentiums.
