Ridge Computers Inc, Santa Clara, today unveils a new top-end for its Unix-based reduced instruction set processors that are the subject of a major OEM and licence agreement with Bull SA in France. The new Ridge 5100 is built around a new line of VLSI processors developed by Ridge and manufactured by Fujitsu in 1.5 micron CMOS. The company says that the single processor 5100 uses parallel instruction execution to achieve performance of 14m Whetstones per second in (presumably 32-bit) floating point operations, and 14 times the VAX-11/780 in integer operations, which it claims means it outperforms the DEC VAX 8800. It does the dou-ble-precision Linpack at 2M-flops. Current 3200 system users can upgrade with a processor swap-out facility. The 3200 is rated at 5 VAX MIPS, the original Ridge Thirty-Two at 2.3 VAX MIPS. The 5100, designed fo rcompute-intensive work with up to 128 users, is built around two of the Fujitsu 20,000 gate arrays, each clocked at 16MHz. 24MHz and 32MHz versions of the processor are planned. The parallel execution feature enables the CPU to perform an integer operation, a memory address translation, and a floating point operation concurrently. It also has up 128Kb of cache, 64Kb each for code and data, and there is a hardware feature that maintains consistency between cache and memory. Branch prediction accuracy is claimed to have reached 93%. The input-output bandwidth of the machine is 20.7Mbytes-per-second, and main memory goes from 144Mb to 1Gb with memory bandwidth of 36Mbytes-per second. Disk goes to 14.4Gb. The new single-board processor and new memory will be offered as a field-upgrade to 3200 users; the new CPU is object-code compatible for Ridge’s RX/V implementation of Unix System V. A 5100 with 16Mb of main memory and 300Mb disk comes in at $109,000, a 32Mb version with 1.2Gb disk is $148,000, and the up-grade board, set for first quarter 1988 is $55,000. Beta testing will start December, volume in February.
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