Following the launch last year of the 32-bit GCOS 64-derived Acos 3800, NEC Corp has now come out with a new top-end for its 36-bit GCOS III-derived line, the Acos 3900, claiming it to be the world’s fastest general-purpose mainframe. The top-end Model 80 with eight tightly-coupled processors, is rated at 700 MIPS in scientific-oriented work. There are eight models, the smallest being the Model 10 uniprocessor rated at 110 MIPS. The machine is built of 20,000 gate per chip logic with propagation delay of 70pS. NEC has traditionally used the Curremnt Mode Logic bipolar technology, but it is not known whether these are CML chips. There is a new ACOS-6/NVX version operating system claimed to be fully compatible with the current ACOS-6/MVXII, which extends the address space to a gigantic 4 Petabytes and supports Unix as a guest. Main memory goes from 512Mb to 1Gb, it has 256 to 512 channels, and aggregate data transfer rate ranges from 1GBytes-per-second to 2Gbps. First ships are set for July 1992 for all but the top two models, which follow in DEcember next year. NEC looks to sell 350 of the things over five years, with Bull SA and Bull HN Information Systems taking 250 of those for the US and Europe – the machines are of course DPS 9000- and GCOS 8-compatible. NEC also announced an ACOS System 3700 to replace the low-end ACOS 830, offering two to three times the performance, for ships in April 1992. It hopes to shift 120, but the 3700 is unlikely to be sold outside Japan. The company also trumped its rivals in the disk drive stakes, with the N7797, which goes from 12.2Gb on the 01 model to 49.1Gb on the 04; average seek time is 12mS, rotational delay, 5.6mS. .pl 63
