Data General Corp, the only mainstream system manufacturer still supporting Motorola Inc’s 88000 series RISC microprocessor, will next week announce a new generation of AViiON servers, plus a workstation bought OEM, based around the semiconductor supplier’s latest 88110 part, our sister paper Unigram.X reports today. First up are two- and four-way, 19 rackmounted AV9500 servers which come with from 64Mb to 2Gb RAM, 256Kb cache per processor and 16 expansion slots supporting up to one terabyte of disk. Six- and eight-way versions of the AV 9500 are due in November, with 12 and 16-way implementations set for spring 1994. The enterprise systems are configured with dual 40MHz CPU boards, two SCSI II channels, and a 16-way AV 9500 is expected to perform at 1,600 MIPS and 1000 TPC-As – four times the performance of its current high-end eight-way 88100 machine launched last July. Also new are two- and four-way AV 8500 servers aimed at office and departmental processing, which come with up to 10Gb disk and six expansion slots. On the desktop, as reported, Data General is expected to announce Omron Corp’s 88110-based Luna 2001 workstation as its AV 500. The OEM agreement was signed back in February, and the box is being manufactured by Omron and Omron Data General Corp (the Japanese Data General subsidiary which Omron acquired in 1991) in Japan. Data General says it will develop new high-end workstations in addition. The 40MHz 88110 system is rated at 37.8 SPECint92 and 50.5 SPECfp92, comes with from 16Mb to 128Mb RAM, 425 or 1Gb disk, 17 or 19 1,280 by 1,024 colour screens, SCSI II, Ethernet and two serial ports. All the new systems are binary compatible with, and upgradable from existing 88100 AViiONs. They run Data General’s DG/UX Unix System V.4 implementation with commercial file enhancements and high availability features. Prices for the servers are expected to start in the $200,000 to $300,000 range. How much longer Data General can reasonably be expected to persevere with the seemingly doomed 88000 architecture apparently depends on how Compagnie des Machines Bull SA does with its multiprocessor implementations of the IBM Corp-Motorola PowerPC RISC. Data General will watch closely before deciding whether to adopt it.
