Longmont, Colorado-based Solbourne Computer Corp is getting ready to announce its line of Texas Instruments Inc Viking-based Series 6 symmetric multi-processors, with volume deliveries scheduled for November. The boxes, to be available in configurations of up to either four or eight processors, will be based on the 33MHz version of the chip. The company had originally planned on using 50MHz Vikings in the Series 6 but with those being unobtainable as yet, they will only come as upgrades. Solbourne, which has passed Sun Microsystems Inc in being able to offer symmmetric multi-processing, is also planning a new release of its SunOS operating system. It says its customers will not be ready to migrate to Solaris until next year. The Series 6, which is said to have gone into beta test two weeks ago, includes two servers, a 700, carrying a maximum of four CPUs, and a 900 with a maximum of eight. A two-processor 200 MIPS 50-user 702 with 128Mb internal memory and 2Gb of disk will be priced at $76,000. A two-processor 902 with 128Mb memory and 3Gb of disk will be $116,600. A 900 model tops out at $165,000. Solbourne hopes to have 300 to 500 in the field by the end of the year. The machines’ official debut was at the International Oracle Conference in San Francisco, followed by a showing at Unix Expo in New York. The Oracle party represents a significant strategic departure for Solbourne, which intends to try to blend the best of the old proprietary world with the best open systems have to offer. Starting with Oracle Financials, it means to tune its hardware, architecture and operating system to optimise software performance just as they did in the good ole days but without threatening the customer with a proprietary hammerlock. The kind of software niches Solbourne would go after would require lots of CPU power, input-output and memory but still be small enough to be unattractive to the likes of Hewlett-Packard Co. Solbourne will detail its SPECint 92 ratings for one, four and eight processor configurations as 993, 3615 and 6442, SPECfps as 1215, 4621 and 8678 respectively.
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