NCR Corp is set to turn the company on its head today with the introduction of a micro to mainframe range of systems based entirely on Intel chips and using high speed implementations of IBM’s Micro Channel Architecture bus, confirming industry gossip first reported here back in April (CI No 1,407). NCR is turning its back on its established Motorola-based range of Tower systems, and eschewing RISC in favour of a one architecture policy, ranging from a low-end 16MHz 80386SX machine – the 3200 – up to the 3600, with 100 80486 processors delivering a claimed 4,000 MIPS for availability in 1992. In between are the 3320 (20MHz SX), 3340 (25MHz 80486) and 3345 (33MHz 80486). Then comes the 27 MIPS 3445, also using a 33MHz 80486, but with 64-bit wide memory bus and 20MHz bus – twice as fast as IBM’s and supporting 128 users. The 3450 is a one to four processor system using 50MHz 80486s, 6Gb disk, and 80MHz Micro Channel, while the 3550 is a 1,000-user machine with up to eight 50MHz processors, 13Gb internal storage, 16 expansion slots and uninterruptable power supply, with ratings from 80 to 320 MIPS. By 1993, NCR says it will have a machine with 4,096 80486s, 100Gb memory, disk capacity in terabytes and performance of some 200,000 MIPS. The systems will run MS-DOS, OS/2, SCO Unix and Unix System V.4, and NCR has settled on Windows and OSF/Motif as the user interface. The new NCR strategy – p2
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