Prime Computer Inc’s strategy for building only the core of its supermini product line itself, and buying in more specialised extensions at both ends, will see the company bringing out major products from two start up firms later this year. In the second quarter, Prime plans to introduce a 64-bit vector and parallel processor from Cydrome Inc of Milpitas, California – the company previously called Axiom Computer Inc (CI No 430): the machine is expected to be front-ended by a Motorola 68020 running Unix, with Ethernet interface and strong Fortran support. The Cydrome machine is expected to deliver between 12 and 14 Mflops. Prime says that it is still planning to incorporate the RISC boards from MIPS Computer Inc, combined with technology acquired from Silicon Graphics, in new workstation. Prime has also extended the commercial and office-oriented strand of its minicomputer line with the top-end 2755, which supports up to 128 users, and offers about 35% better performance than the 2655 at about 4% higher price. The 2755 has 64Kb cache against 16Kb on the 2655, up to 16Mb main memory against 8Mb, and is rated at about 1.6 MIPS against 1.3 MIPS. Base US CPU price is $95,050, with a typical configuration costing $102,000.
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