Sun Microsystems’ attempt to compete with Ardent Computer and Stellar Computer systems at the high end of the market has gained further impetus with the introduction by Mercury Computer Systems Inc, Lowell, Massachusetts, of a 64-bit attached RISC processor slot-in board, the MC6400, which it claims, transforms workstations such as the Sun 3 and Sun 4 series into personal supercomputers. The MC6400 unit, which is designed to work in conjunction with the host CPU and operating system, is based on Weitek Corp’s XL-8064 three chip set, providing 10 MIPS, 20 MFLOPS and a CPU cycle time of 100nS. Currently, the MC6400 supports only the VMEbus, but in mid-1989 AT bus support is expected to be added for the Sun 386i, Apollo workstations and AT-alikes, and DEC’s Q bus for MicroVAX and VAXstations will also be supported. Faster Weitek chips, also available in 1989 will reduce the cycle time to 80nS, boosting performance to 12.5MIPS and 25 MFLOPS. The board is specifically designed to accelerate C and Fortran applications in the general scientific and engineering environment, and operates with Unix System V.3, MS DOS, OS/2, VMS and Apollo’s Aegis. The MC6400 is available now as two separate boards fitting into a single VME slot on both the Sun 3 and Sun 4, and 4Mb and 8Mb versions cost UKP9,795 and UKP12,495 respectively. Some units have already been sold in the US and UK distributor Microprocessor & Memory Distribution Ltd of Reading says it is negotiating with UK companies in the areas of three dimensional graphics, signal processing, and simulation, for orders.
