Prime Computer Inc’s withdrawal of its MXCL 5 version of the Cydrome Inc machine from the minisupercomputer market has implications for Japan, where Prime already has customers for the thing: it also chimes oddly with the words of Prime’s representative on the US Dept of Commerce’s SuperComputer Trade Mission to Japan, the latest of which occurred in late June when an eight-member group representing the US supercomputer industry visited Japan, and Lee Adamson, senior manager, Engineering and Scientific Sales Support for Prime in the US said that sales of its minisuper mini were going well, bringing the total percentage of Prime’s business emanating from Japan to between 3% and 5% of the company’s worldwide total of about $1,500m; Prime has been in Japan 4 years, and has had its ups and downs, including change of president (from an Australian to the current Japanese ex-IBMer); it will continue to sell its engineering workstations; Japanese sources say the real reason for Prime’s decision to dump the Cydrome is that the thing performed less well that it had expected – Prime had hoped the processing speed was expected to be three to four times that of vector processing rivals; but the Japanese market is getting somewhat overcrowded, with Alliant, Convex, Gould and others setting up subsidiaries.
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