Back in the late 1970s, Sperry Corp, now subsumed into Unisys Corp, achieved a dramatic improvement in price-performance for its 1100 series mainframe family by designing a machine using Motorola Inc’s 10800 4-bit ECL bit-slice microprocessor. It needed to split the instruction stream in two and effectively create two 36-bit arithmetic-logic units side by side to get the mainframe performance it required, but the 1100/60 proved a major base-builder for the company because it reduced the entry price for mainframe computing so much. Up to now, 1100s – and their 2200 successors – have generally been built out of ECL for its higher performance, despite the cost penalty, but now Unisys is trying a similar dramatic cost-cutting trick by creating a new low-end 2200/500 model with the processor integrated onto 18 CMOS devices that replace 197 ECL parts in the 2200/900 processor on which it is modelled. The company is calling the new machine the Open 2200/500 enterprise server and it is accompanied by a new release of 1100 OS called the Open System 2200 operating environment. OS 2200 runs on all 2200s and 1100s, and the Open implies principally Posix compliance. It also offers open data management between Unisys and alien databases via SQL/89, open client-server interfaces, system control for managing an environment conforming to the Open Software Foundation Distributed Computer and Management Environments, and Unisys’ Open Systems Interconnection implementation, with TCP/IP and SNA support. Transaction processing conforming to X/Open Co Ltd standards is promised for mid-1994. Switching to CMOS chips enables Unisys to offer two to three times the computing power per dollar compared with ECL. The machine goes into a 19 rack, supports one to four processors, up to 1Gb memory and can address 900Tb of data with 36-bit real and 54-bit virtual addressing. First-day orders for the 2200/500 exceed $50m; prices go from $350,000 for a uniprocessor to $1.6m for a four-processor model – UKP280,000 to UKP1.3m in the UK. Shipments start November.
