Tandem Computers Inc yesterday duly announced its promised new models of the Himalaya and Integrity servers, claiming that the R-series RISC-based machines offer up to three times the performance of current models at comparable pricing. The new servers feature performance-enhancing parallel communications capabilities in the shape of Asynchronous Transfer Mode interfaces. The new Himalaya parallel servers are the K20000, the K2000, K200 and K2, and the K20000 can scale to over 4,000 processors, offering a 50% performance boost over the K10000, while the K2000 and the K200 offer 100% performance improvement. The K2 provides a 300% performance improvement over the former entry-level K100 at the same $25,000 entry price. Existing users can upgrade by swapping boards or by adding the new boards to their existing configuration. There are also new Integrity NR and FT Unix machines using the 200MHz R4400 RISC: the new Integrity servers include the symmetric multiprocessor NR/4412 and NR/4436 models. The performance improvement is tagged at 33% but users of the Integrity NR models may see a 70% performance boost in some cache-dependent applications. Tandem went to its UB Networks unit for the GeoRim/Ethernet Asynchronous Transfer Mode gateway, which scales up to 12 connections to the Himalaya server so data from an Asynchronous Mode network can be broken into multiple Ethernet connections and fed to individual CPUs; K20000s go from $339,000, March.
