The GS1000 graphics supercomputer under development at Stellar Computer Inc, Newton, Massachusetts, is due for first customer shipments in March, and founder William Poduska couldn’t resist telling Computer Systems News a bit about it. The single-user machine sounds disconcertingly similar in concept to the one due at about the same time from Allen Michels’ Ardent Computer Corp formerly Dana. It is built of 61 custom CMOS circuits integrating 2m or so gates, designed by Stellar and manufactured for it by LSI Logic Corp. Texas Instruments is putting the thing together with Stellar at present doing only final assembly and test. According to Poduska, the GS1000 has an enormous 512-bit memory bus and is rated at about 25 MIPS and 40 MFLOPS. It will run Unix System V.3, offer the X Window facility, with TCP/IP and SNA networking as well as Sun Microsystems’ Network File System. The Phigs Programmer’s Hierarchical Interactive Graphics Standard from Template Graphics Software, San Diego will also be offered. Poduska expects the thing to sell for about $100,000 and says Stellar already has a large order backlog from users in aerospace, automotive, image analysis, molecular modelling and fluidics field. He looks for profit by year-end, sales of $400m to $500m annually in five years, and a public flotation early next year.
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