Unisys Corp has boosted the power of its 80486-based 6000/35 model in its U6000 Unix line with the addition of a 66MHz chip. Ronald Bell, vice-president and general manager of the company’s Unix System Group in San Jose, California, told our sister paper Unigram.X that Unisys is now readying its next-generation U6000 range for launch next year. The range will include the 6000/100 (replacing the current 15), 300 (35) and 500 (65), as well as a new low-end DT 486/P5 pizza box desktop. That will be the first from Unisys to run Unix System Laboratories Inc’s Destiny System V.4.2 operating system, and will have up to three EISA slots. The U6000/300 will be the company’s first machine to use Intel Corp’s P5 microprocessor, and will have eight slots and come with single or dual processor options. We have P5s running in the labs at 50MHz, and see no problem with them getting to 66MHz, says Bell. Most interesting is the U6000/500, the flagship design on which future distributed processing systems will be based (CI No 2,026). The 500 will feature up to five processors and a high performance memory bus in a Hypercube configuration. At the application level, Unisys has been working with the database companies on distributed technology, including lock management. The strategy seems to ignore the Open Software Foundation’s Remote Procedure Call-based Distributed Computing Environment, which opts for the Mach microkernel. Remote Procedure Calls at kernel level are tempting, but mean changes to the applications, says Bell, but he says the Foundation has some interesting interfaces, and that Unisys will adhere to standards. Unisys’ moves might make the future seem less bright for Sequent Computer Systems Inc, which currently provides the top-end 6000/75 and 85 multiprocessors for Unisys, but We will be taking Sequent’s P5 product next year, says Bell. He adds that the relationship with Sequent is continuing and deepening – we have a joint partnership, not just an OEM relationship. Sequent, too, he suggests, is looking closely at the problems of bus bandwidth and distributed computing.
