Wang Laboratories Inc picked a poor day to announce its long awaited successors to the low-end single digit models of the VS line, but out they came yesterday as the VS5000 family, representing the first single chip CPU implementation of VS processor, developed in conjunction with VLSI Technology Inc, in which Wang is an investor, which is making the chip in 2 micron CMOS, but will shrink it as the need arises. There are currently four models, 5000/30 and 40 clocked at 25MHz, 50 at 28.6MHz and the 60 at 33.3MHz. The pipelined chip uses a similar design to NCR’s NCR 32 with a reduced set of micro-instructions with multiple parallel operations, assembled into macroinstructions to implement the VS set. A new 20Mbyte-per-second Information Bus is designed to maximise inter-processor communications and is claimed to be 50% faster than the VAXBI bus. Wang will offer native Unix as well as VS on the new line. The CPU offers four times the power of an entry VS but is 32% cheaper. A typical six user entry system is UKP13,000; for 60 users: UKP140,000 up.
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